The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I attempted to roll out before you the overall significance of the earnestness of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science through the fact that I made the effort to show you what a difference exists between the overly abstract representations and conceptions, and that which also comes about in the soul in the form of representations and concepts—which also takes on the configuration of representations and concepts—but then is reality, effective working. We are concerned with the fact that man has the strong insight, how the human being, in his increasingly materialistic attitude (through the fact that he completely turns away from spiritual concepts) only concerns himself with concepts of the natural realm etc., makes himself evermore similar to the element of matter, how he in fact climbs down into this matter element, so that in the end it is no longer false when he maintains that the matter of his body thinks, his brain thinks—but that that is even correct that man becomes in fact a robot of the universe—and gradually, bit by bit, through the denial of the soul-spiritual element, the actual losing of this soul-spiritual element occurs. I said that this is naturally an uncomfortable view of the world for many people, and that many take to be something that they do not wish to accept for the reason that they believe that the human being, without his own input, will somehow in the long run be able to have his soul-spiritual element saved. This however, is not the case. The human being can also so strongly immerse himself into the material element that he cuts himself off from the soul-spiritual element, that he sinks himself into the Ahrimanic powers and continues on with these Ahrimanic powers in a world stream alien to our world, but without his ego, which indeed cannot belong to the Ahrimanic world, but which can only find its actually intended development when man follows the normal progressive element, that is, when he joins himself to everything that is connected to the Mystery of Golgotha, when he, above all else, recognises that in our time one has to seek the connection to what can be brought to all mankind in the way of spiritual research. In this evolution of humanity that has taken place for the occident since the middle of the 15th century, the period has begun in which the human being, when he looks out into his environment perceives only the sense world. And when he looks into himself since the middle of the 15th century he has been increasingly misled in the direction of intellectualising, abstracting, making thin his inner soul experiences.

What we experience today as concepts, what we receive for our view of the world out of the customary official professions, that contains, basically, absolutely no relationship to existence. That also cannot be used to penetrate into the true realities. It is only a prejudice when one believes that the human being, in that he makes the usual abstract thoughts, actually has a life of soul. These abstract thoughts are actually an element alien to reality, they are merely a sum of images; so that we can say: outside himself man sees the sense world, and inside man sees that which, fundamentally is only a world of images which basically has no real connection to existence.—That is actually the destiny of mankind since the middle of the 15th century; to perceive the sense world outside—we shall soon see what significance this sense world has in regard to a universal world view—and to experience “inside” a soul element that increasingly becomes a mere image element. One can raise the question: why is it then that mankind of the civilised world since the 15th century, in regard to soul existence, has become increasingly mere images? That is so, so that man, through this, can ascend to a true freedom.

So as to understand that, lets look at our world more closely as it is for us today and as we ourselves stand within it, Let us disregard the human being himself in the whole of the wide world; look upon all that can be found in all the wide world, shall we say as clouds, mountains, rivers, as structures of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and let us ask ourselves: what is then actually in the whole surrounding, of what one may so describe as I have done it? Let us just schematically sketch what we are concerned about. Shall we say: everything above us, everything spread out around us as the minerals, the plants, and to a certain degree the animals—the human beings we shall disregard, which naturally in reality we cannot do, but which we may do hypothetically - thus we imagine that that is nature without the human being. Here, in this entire nature, without the human being, there are no gods. That is what has to be seen and understood! In this nature devoid of humans the gods do not exist, just as in the shucked oyster shell the oyster does not exist or in a separated snail shell the snail does not exist, This entire world devoid of humans which I have spoken of hypothetically, it is what the divine beings have separated from in the course of development, just as the oyster separates from its shell, The gods, the divine beings are no longer within it, as little as the oyster or the snail are in their separated and shed shells. What we have around us as world as I have described it is in the past. In that we look out upon the nature, we look upon the past of the spiritual element, and upon what has remained as a leftover from the past of the spiritual element, Therefore, there also no longer exists the possibility of truly coming to a religious consciousness merely through looking upon the outer world, for one should by no means believe that in this outer world there is present anything consisting of the actual humanity—creating spiritual divine beings. Elemental beings, certainly: a lower order of spiritual beings, that is another matter; but what the actual creative spiritual beings are that belong to the consciousness of religion as such, that belongs to this world only insofar as it is the shell, the residue, what is left behind.

Such things as we have just touched upon are indeed sometimes felt as earnest truths by single outstanding personalities. Truths that arise in the souls of such personalities. The one who, in the spiritual development of the 19th century, felt most deeply how what surrounds man as nature is the remainder of a divine spiritual development is Phillip Mainlaender, who through the overburdening heaviness of this knowledge arrived at his philosophy of suicide, and then also ended his life in suicide. Sometimes it is the destiny of human beings through their karma, to have to go very deeply into such one-sided truths. Then this destiny itself becomes for one incarnation one-sided and difficult, as it did for Phillip Mainlaender, the unfortunate German philosopher.

After you have taken that up into yourselves which we had to say about this hypothetical outer nature, you can now ask yourself: indeed, where are then the gods, those gods of which we speak as the actual creative ones? Here I would have to make the schematic sketch a little different, here I have to sketch the human being, and within the human being the gods. If I may put it this way: within the human skin, in the human organs are the actual creative gods. The human beings, in their being, are the bearers of the Divine Spiritual Being at present. Thus the divine-spiritual, that is also the actual creative element in the present, is within the human being. And if today you imagine the entire outer nature, and then imagine a future of several thousand years lying before us, nothing will then exist of these clouds, minerals, plants, and even the animals. Nothing of all that will exist, that now lives outside the human skin. But what gives the inner human organisation its permeating spirit and soul, that will find its continuing development, that will be the future.

If I were to sketch this schematically, then I would have to say: if this large outside circle is nature, and the smaller one within it is man, and the smaller kernel within it is the human-divine element, then, in the future nature will be shattered and disbursed (shown by outraying beams). The human being will be expanded into a world, and that which today is his inner core will be his outer surroundings, the nature itself.

The insight into the fact that the divine-spiritual, which we have to address as the really creative element in the present, lies within the human skin, is a uniquely serious bit of knowledge. For that lays a responsibility upon the human being in regard to the whole cosmos. This enables the human being to understand such a thing as the Christ word: “Heaven and earth shall pass away,” that is, the outer world, “but my words will not pass away.” And if the word of Paul is fulfilled in the single human being: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” then again the words of Christ live in the single human being: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words” in the single human being, that is, what is within the skin and is taken up by Christ, “will not pass away.”

But what does what I have said indicate? It indicates that man through his abstract concepts, through what he has intellectualised, has so to speak, made himself empty in his inner being ever since the middle of the 15th century. For what purpose then has he made himself empty? He has made himself empty, just so that he can take up the Christ impulse, that is to take up the creative-divine into his own inner being. We look into the outer world, I said: we look only into the sense element. There we see only the divine past. Among those things that have remained out of this divine past are also the elemental spirits etc. which have remained at a lower stage. We look into our inner being, and in this inner being we see at first the mere imaged abstract concepts that are increasingly intellectualised—which only thereby become something concrete and real, in that the human being takes up the spirit-impulse through spiritual science and joins it to his inner life. Man has the choice—and this choice becomes an ever more serious matter since the middle of the 15th century—either to remain static with the intellectualised abstract concepts, or to take up the vitalising content of spiritual science. If he stays with the intellectual abstract concepts, then he will further develop a brilliant natural science—for these concepts are dead, and he will grasp the dead nature with the dead concepts in a remarkable way. But all that makes a mummy out of him, all that similarises him to the element of matter, all that leads to the fact that he succumbs to the Ahrimanic element, For the continuing progress of earthly affairs, for the progressive continuation of the entire earth development he needs the taking up of the spiritual element—which today does not approach the the human being in an atavistic instinctive way, but rather which has to be worked for, worked hard for, by the human being. Thus the taking up of the science of the spirit is not a theory, but rather is the working out, the working for, of something real. It is the filling out, of the otherwise empty inner soul life, with a spiritual and spiritualised content. With an empty inner life, confronting the past in what is outside, thus will humanity in its mass remain today in that it only wants to give real meaning to thought-logic along with experimentation and does not want to take up what is a vitalising spiritual life. The world today stands not only in danger of succumbing to the Ahrimanic element, but it is also in danger of losing the mission of the earth as a whole.

Whoever thinks this through and feels this through will only first properly sense the deep earnestness that is to be connected to the acquisition of spiritual science, And he will then not underestimate this knowledge, which is the knowledge of the human being. The knowledge of the human being does not actually exist within present day natural science or within the old religious traditions. What do the old religious traditions offer? They direct the gaze of the human beings up into abstract, world-estranged heights; they do not speak of how the gods indeed live, organically, in the inner life of man's being, These thoughts they would declare to be heretical to the highest degree. If today one wanted to bring the traditional European and American religious confessions to an understanding that the gods live in human beings, and that this ancient word is a truth: the human body is the temple of the gods - they would rise up in indignation and wrath against such heresy. Thus, this is on the one hand.

On the other hand we have a materialistically oriented natural science which, just because it is materialistic, does not understand matter. What does natural science understand about the function of the human brain? What does natural science understand about the function of the heart, etc.? I have often showed you, and have also expressed it publically that material science holds the view, for instance, that the human heart is a kind of pump that pumps the blood in the body. This general heart science taught as university science is simply nonsense, no more or less than simple nonsense. It is really not the case that the heart is a pump that presses the blood out in all directions and again allows it to return, but the actual vitalising element is the circulating of the blood itself. There is in the blood, in the circulating blood itself, there lives what just in human existence is the actual mover of the circulation in the human organism, and the heart is only the expression of this and nothing else, The circulating movement is evident. Whoever says, in the sense of today's natural science that the heart drives the blood into the body he speaks in approximately the same way, as though one would say: when it was ten minutes to nine the one hand was close to nine, and the other hand was over ten, and these hands along with the whole clock works have driven me up here to the podium. But that is, indeed, not so! the clock is only the expression for that which has happened. Just as little is the heart the pump works that brings it about that the blood is driven through the body; it is only the expression for it; it is a concomitent part of this entire blood system, and is the expression for the blood system.

Natural science as it is generally practised today also leads just as little into the inner life of the human being; at the very most it makes the inner into something external in that it dissects corpses. However, through this one does not come into the inner life, one comes thereby only to making the inner into something external, for at the moment when one anatomises the interior of the human being, one makes what one achieves into something external. Thus we are concerned with the fact that in the entire spiritual life today there is tendency present to really penetrate into the inner life of the human being. This is just what spiritual science has to bring; here spiritual science has to bring the knowledge of the human being. However, most of our contemporaries are frightened away from this knowledge of man. why, then? Because the religious traditions for centuries have expressly surrounded man in a fear regarding all real striving for knowledge. One needs only to consider what nebulosity, what a swimming in words the traditional confessions have presented to man, which they then bring to a climax in the sermon, that the human being ought not to cognise the super-sensible element, but just believe it, merely feel it in a darkling way. All that bears within it the tendency that man, even out of his arrogance, his having too high an opinion of himself, and yet at the same time out of his tendency to inertia, brings to birth the idea: one does not need to think about the divine, that must rise up out of the depths in dim feelings and instincts. Then, however, there rises up nothing other than the dim miasma of the organic element, which is then transposed into illusions, which then again are transformed by the practioners and theologians (who are working toward comfortably convenient practices) into all sorts of nebulous things.

Through many centuries the instinct for knowledge was suppressed which solely and along can bring humanity forwards, on the course of earthly development, and then onwards in the course of spiritual development. Today, human beings downright get gooseflesh when they are to begin to develop real cognition and are to live up into the spiritual world. But to the degree that one gets this gooseflesh, to that same degree one cuts oneself off from the spiritual-soul beings, and similarises oneself to the element of matter.

One can say that when such things are to be undertaken seriously, then human beings immediately withdraw in fright, because today everything is considered only externally. I should like to intersperse something here which I have recently noticed again. We have founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. This Waldorf School was founded entirely out of the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that is to say, a pedagogy and didactics was given in lectures to those who were expressly chosen for this school. Here we are concerned with spirit that has permeated into this pedagogy and didactics. Today it is already even happening—for everything that is founded by us becomes a sensation—that people want to visit this Waldorf School and observe it for a couple of hours, in order to see whether in this couple of hours something or other could be observed that is somewhat different than in other schools—thus, again, only a sensation! However, the spirit of the Waldorf School one can become acquainted with only through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not in that one sits down so as to audit the lessons, and disturbs the instruction to a lesser or greater degree. To take up anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is just more inconvenient and less sensational, than it is to audit -that is to say, basically to make it more convenient and comfortable for oneself.

The pedagogy and didactics we are dealing with here reckon with spiritual worlds and above all with the pre-existence of the human being. How is it then with the pre-existence of the human being? Well, we think back to the earthly year of our birth. Let us suppose we were descended to earthly life in this period of time (a short red line is drawn). Children who are born quite a bit later, during this same time, have still been above in the spiritual world (a longer red line above). We were already on the earth during the time when those children were still above. They bring something to us that has been experienced in the spiritual world during the time when we were already down in the physical world.

One can see that consciously in the children that are before one, if one instructs with the pedagogy and didactics in such a way as the instruction should be in the Waldorf School. One should vividly place onesself into the spirit of the child, that is, develop the practice in daily life, for the reality of what must be given in representations and ideas from out of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. But just from such things people were kept away through the traditions of the traditional religious confessions, who above all else, did not want that the inner activity would be more highly developed in human beings, which then also leads to real knowledge of man, and which brings about the deep truth that the location of the gods is itself within the skin of the human being.

Let us look upon our planets from outside. In all of what otherwise is in the planets, there is no divine-spiritual element, From out of the human-like beings that are upon them, there radiates the divine element out from the planet. Are the planets thereby diminished, because this radiates out from the bodies of the human beings? You will also become formally friendly with this thought, if you take it away from earthly life and transpose it onto another planet. In that you stand here upon the earth, you will to be sure, find that this thought has something preserved and oppressive about it, the thought that you and your fellow human beings are the bearers of the divine-spiritual element. But if skilfully you direct your gaze to another planet, then you shall more easily be able to conceive the thought, that among those beings who constitute the highest kingdom of nature there, is the location from which the divine-spiritual element gleams down toward you.

The thought which we have developed today supplements from a particular side the other earnest thoughts which we have yesterday allowed to appear before our souls.

Yesterday we have allowed the thought to appear before our soul, that in the interior of the human being that is developed, which is to bring forth the further reality of the earth development which is to carry the earth development forward, whereas it also lies within the will of the human being to hinder this earth development: to take up the Ahrimanic stream alone. And today we place alongside this the other thought, that actually everything that is around us is transitory outer nature, for it today represents only a leftover of the divine-spiritual creating. Divine-spiritual creating which hold sway in the present and will hold sway in the future: that is what is present within the human skin; so that it appears to be paradoxical, and yet is true, when one says: everything which the eyes see, which the ears hear from out of the human surroundings, that passes away with the earth. That alone which lives in the spaces that are enclosed in the human skin that lives over into Jupiter, that carries earth existence into the future planetary development. One will again receive an urge to really become acquainted with the relationship of the human being to the cosmos, when one places the tremendously serious necessity before one's gaze, to learn the real knowledge about the human being.

The human being indeed actually lives between two extremes. We have called these extremes the luciferic stream and the ahrimanic stream. We can also grasp them, I should like to say, in a more elementary way. The philosophers have always spoken of the fact that man cannot actually grasp his being going out from the thoughts. That is also actually true; for, what it is that man has as the feeling of Being; from whence does that actually come? The human being exists in the spiritual world before he enters, through conception or birth, into the physical existence. He comes down out of supersensible worlds into his earthly, physical, sensory existence, Here he experiences, above all, something new that he has not experienced in the supersensible worlds, which actually encompasses when he has descended. That is what one—but only representatively—can call gravity, the attractive force of the earth, which one can call “having weight.” Now, you know: the expression “having weight” is only actually taken from the most important phenomenon of gravity. For what we have, for example, as “being tired” is also something similar to “having weight” and what we feel in our extremities when we exercise them is also something that is related to “having weight.” But because “having weight” is the most representative of these things, we can say: the human being places himself into gravity. And in a concealed way the human being always perceives something of this gravity when he designates something or other on the earth as real.

In the opposite sense, if the human being is between death and a new birth, there, just as on earth he is joined to gravity, he is then joined to the light. For light also has a sense: “to the light” is again used in a representative way, for we receive through the eyes most of our higher sense perceptions, when we have vision, and then we speak of light. But that which lives in the sense-feeling of the eyes as light, is the same as what lives as sound for the sensing-feeling of the ear and gives evidence of itself in single tones, as the light gives evidence of itself in single colors, And this it is also for the other senses. Fundamentally speaking it is the stimulation by all the senses which one designates representatively as light, just as one designates gravity in a representative way. We are taken up into the extreme of gravity when we descend to the earth. We are taken up into the extreme of light when we transpose ourselves through death into the world between death and a new birth. And we are always, actually fitted into the middle condition between light and gravity, and every sense-feeling, in that we experience here, is fundamentally half light and half gravity. At the moment when we, perhaps through something pathological or through a dream, experience ourselves without our gravity, we experience the mere spiritual element as just in a bout of fever or in a dream. The bout of fever, in regard to the soul, consists in this, that man has experiences, without being aware of his own gravity while experiencing them. This balance between gravity and light, into which we are spanned, that is, for a great deal of what we experience in the world in that we as men are spiritual-physical beings, just that which is intimately with the world riddles. But neither the world stream that lives itself out in the traditional religious confessions, nor that which lives itself out in the fantasies of natural science, arrives at the break-through from the abstract concepts into the light or form the sense-feelings down into gravity. Human beings have indeed become blind, deaf, and stupid regarding these things.

Let us take a crystal; that gives itself its own from. What then is in that as a force? In that is the same force man feels pressing down upon him, the same force that gives form to the entire earth. Just look there where the earth can give form: in the whole surface of the sea, in water; here gravity gives the form. Then the same force gives the crystal the form, only here it works from within. The scientific fantasies move in the direction of saying: what lies behind matter, or in matter, one does not know, that is a world riddle. What lies behind the surface of matter we experience, when we experience our own gravity, for in regard to the whole earth we are placed within the same forces which, for example, work in the small entities and hold the single parts together. One must just be in the position to recognise the great in the small, and the small in the great, and not just speculate what may stand behind matter. What goes beyond matter, the divine-spiritual element that holds sway in the beings, that must be recognised through the fact that one stokes up the fires that can be stoked in the inner element, which brings one to higher inner experiencing, that brings to understanding the concepts and representations that are really related to what dwells in the temple, which is represented by old traditions as being man himself,

There is something within old atavistic widsom, as I have often emphasized, which one can experience with deep devotion, In the present, one is called upon again in full consciousness to fetch it up again out of the depths of being, and also to make this a guideline for the spiritual and social actions, and for life.

I must begin with the gratifying observation that upon my return¹ I encountered a great many friends who are here in Dornach for the first time. They have come to inform themselves about what goes on in Dornach and what is meant to proceed from here into our anthroposophical movement. I cordially welcome all the newly arrived friends and hope that because of their stay with us they can carry back with them many new inspirations. Among the friends we can greet once again are many we have not seen for years. This fact along with much else undoubtedly indicates the difficulties of the age in which we live. I have just returned from a visit in Stuttgart, which was filled with the manifold tasks generated within our anthroposophical sphere of work. Among other matters, it included the ending of the first academic year of the Waldorf School² founded in Stuttgart. This Waldorf School belongs to those establishments which manifest most prominently the ideas of our anthroposophical spiritual movement. Even though one sets high standards for it, the completion of the first school year has demonstrated that there is cause for satisfaction. I can say this because it is possible to remain objective even if one is wholeheartedly involved in the project and even if, in a certain sense, one has been its instigator.

Above all it is gratifying to see how the Waldorf School teaching staff definitely understood how to proceed from a completely anthroposophical basis, as had always been the intention. Present-day conditions necessitated that this basis in anthroposophy should not produce a school that teaches a certain world view, a school in which anthroposophy would be taught. That was never the intention. With this in mind, therefore, we arranged the religious instruction so that children of Protestant parents, who wished them to have Protestant religious instruction, could be taught by a Protestant minister; Catholic children, by a priest. Only those who did not care to be numbered among the existing denominations were separately taught a form of anthroposophical religious instruction. Except for this, we certainly never considered the founding of an institution that teaches a specific world outlook. All efforts were directed toward the creation of a school in which the practical teaching impulses arising from the viewpoint and will of our spiritual science could for once be directly applied in the education and instruction of youth. It was our aim that the anthroposophic impetus should be expressed not in the content of the classes but in the way classes were taught, in the manner in which the whole school system was handled; that this impetus be manifested in the specific kind, and the different methods, of instruction. Once an anthroposophist has stimulated his classes through his anthroposophic will, the fertilization of the teaching process shows precisely what a vitalizing effect anthroposophy has when it is implemented in this way.

Throughout its first year, I always had the opportunity to observe the progress at the Waldorf School. Again and again, I was there for one or two weeks. I could supervise instruction and was able to watch the development of the different classes. I could see, for instance, how our friend, Dr. Stein,³ succeeded in enlivening his history class for older students by bringing anthroposophic impulses into history. Anthropology, as taught by Fräulein Dr. von Heydebrandt in the fifth grade, was lifted from the tedium prevailing ordinarily in our schools by imbuing it truly with anthroposophic will. I could cite many other instances from which you could clearly see that without in any way teaching abstract anthroposophy the subject matter comes alive by the method and the way it is treated and fertilized by anthroposophy. This practical application of anthroposophic strength of purpose shows that anthroposophy need not remain an abstract, remote philosophy, but can definitely influence human activity, even though we unfortunately have little opportunity to penetrate human affairs, except in limited areas like the Waldorf School. Now, when we ended the first year something happened that seemed to be only an exterior matter, but, as I am about to explain, it was an event that had great inner significance. A complete innovation took place. It concerned the report cards.

The report card system is truly one of the most miserable aspects of our schools. In a superficial, groping manner, teachers must grade their students from 1, 2, 3, 4 to 5 and so on,^T1 a procedure that stifles the very nature of schools in a most appalling way. Our report cards are based on actual educational psychology, on an absolutely practical application of human psychology. At the end of the first school year, the teachers were at the point where they were able to write a report card for every child corresponding to its own character and capabilities, individually indicating the possibility for continued growth and progress. No report card was like any other. There were no numbers indicating grades. Instead, through the teacher's individual insight into his pupil, the student received a characterization of his personality. Already in the course of the first school year, the teachers had so intimately sought to deepen their understanding of every child's soul that they were able to write into the report card an accompanying verse suited to each recipient's individual character.

These report cards are an innovation. Do not conclude, however, that it can be imitated or readily introduced somewhere else, because this change has been brought about by the whole spirit of the Waldorf School and is based on the fact that the most intensive educational psychology was practiced during the first school year. We carefully studied what was causing certain intimate manifestations in the faster or slower progress of a class, and already in the course of the first school year, we made a few discoveries that were in some ways surprising. We learned, for example, that the whole configuration of a class takes on a specific form if the number of boys and girls in that class is equal. The configuration is a quite different one if boys are in the majority and girls in the minority, and it changes again when there are more girls than boys in a class We have had all these examples in our classes. These imponderables, which elsewhere are not taken into consideration at all, are in many ways the essential element in a class.

When one attempts to express certain aspects of psychology, trying to define them in so many words, he is then already past the point that really matters. It is just the predominant and nonsensical custom of our time that one attempts to express things too rigidly in words. One cannot study matters thoroughly if one wants to express them in this constrictive word structure. One must be aware that by expressing things in this manner they can only be indicated approximately.

Of course, we always find ourselves in an odd position when we talk about the results of our anthroposophically oriented movement of spiritual science. The Waldorf School, whose teachers have proven themselves eminently suited to their tasks, could only justify itself because a group of human beings was gathered together who were most competent and pedagogically most qualified. It is unfortunate that in any effort to carry something out in a practical sense today, one encounters, much more than is generally realized, the one great obstacle, namely, a lack of qualified people. Today, the world has a paucity of people who are qualified for any real tasks in life. In our case the difficulty would be compounded should a second school be established. To find suitable, really proficient individuals capable of working in the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would be much more difficult because the one existing school has, of course, already attracted all those who could seriously be considered. Yet there can be no doubt that, for once, something has been accomplished in a certain area. I must say, however, that this is like an island. There, in the course of the first school year, a spiritual system of education has become manifest which truly evolved from the fundamentals of anthroposophy. It is an island, however, enclosed within its shores. Beyond these shores, the financial and economic connections of the school are affected by the great decline in the economic and political life of the present. This is where the problems lie. We can see that our prospects are not what they should be; they are not as good as they should be considering the nature of our achievement. Yet does anyone have even a slight understanding of what the Waldorf School has created based on the spirit?

The Waldorf School was founded by our friend Molt⁴ so that the children of the Waldorf Astoria Works could receive an education. Already in the first year, many children from the outside, who were unconnected to the factory, became students at the school; there must have been around 280 of them. Now, many new students have been registered, but from the Waldorf Astoria Works we have no more than were previously here, as well as the few who have meanwhile reached school age. If everything goes really well, and if economic and other problems can be solved, we shall, judging from the present applications, have more than four hundred students in our school. This means we shall have to build, hire more teachers, establish parallel classes. All this must happen! In a certain sense it will be a crucial test as to whether the financial understanding of our needs by those involved can keep pace with what induces so many people from the outside to bring us their children. It was somewhat ironical to me when the mother of one of our students was introduced to me in the school corridor as Frau Minister So and So. Even those connected with the present government are bringing their children to the Waldorf School now!

Some of these matters actually should be studied more closely in their social context as well. Then, perhaps, it would be possible to perceive the real needs of our society and how they are met by institutions such as the Waldorf School.

Now and then the Waldorf School was beset by a certain superficiality that is a characteristic of our times, as I have often pointed out. The leadership of the school was naturally confronted with people here and there who wanted to visit for a while, that is to snoop around a bit. Yet there is really not all that much to see. What does matter is the whole spirit at work in the school, and that is simply the anthroposophical spirit. People who can't make the effort to read anthroposophic books and who hope to set something from scouting round in the Waldorf School would be better served by deepening their knowledge of anthroposophy. For what bestows spirit on the Waldorf School and lies at its very foundation can only be seen in the spiritual impulses that are the Basis of anthroposophical spiritual life. I have often pointed out to those who have been attending my lectures for some time that today the anthroposophic spiritual life is not directed only toward the individual who seeks the way out of his soul's distress and life's afflictions in the spiritual forces of the world. Today, spiritual science must address itself to the need and decline of our time. Then, however, the comprehension of what spiritual science has to offer will be met by that special kind of understanding that a person today can generally bring to anything of a spiritual nature. When talking about spiritual science, it is often necessary to speak in an entirely different language than is customary. One could say that in a certain sense words acquire a new meaning through spiritual science. It is absolutely necessary to feel and to sense this.

Today I would like to acquaint you with some things that can illustrate how essential it is not only to be willing to hear a somewhat different world view expressed in customary terminology, but to learn to receive the words differently with one's feelings.

Let us begin with a specific case. When speaking about any ideology today, it is designated by an abstract name: materialism, idealism, spiritualism, and so forth, and people are quite sure that they can say which is correct, and which is incorrect. A materialist comes to a spiritualist, for example, and explains to him his way of thinking, how he sees man's thoughts and feelings as products of the brain. The spiritualist answers, “You think incorrectly. I can refute that logically!” Or, perhaps, “That is contradicted by the facts!” In short, the crux of the matter is that today, when people talk about issues concerning world views, one ideology is said to be right and the other one wrong. The spiritualist presumes that only he has the correct philosophy, and wishes to prove the materialist wrong and convince him that he would be better off if he became a spiritualist.

Spiritual science has nothing to do with such a way of proceeding. It does not wish to lead to a different logical insight from that of other world views. Spiritual science, if it really fulfills its task, must become action based on insight. In spiritual science, knowledge must turn into action, action in the whole cosmic world context. I will explain this by using a few definite examples. Today, when people look at the world naively but with a slight materialist tendency, when they direct their eyes and ears outward, hear sounds, notice colors, experience warmth and similar sensations, they perceive the external material world. Should they become scientists, or merely absorb through popular means what science wishes to represent, they will then form or simply accept certain concepts that have originated through the combination of all the color, sound and warmth elements and others that are to be observed in the external world. Now, there are people who maintain that everything one sees is, in the first place, only an external phenomenon. Yet this idea is generally not gone into thoroughly enough. People see a rainbow, for example. As a result of their education, when they look at the rainbow, they are already convinced that the rainbow is only an apparition, that they cannot go to the place where the rainbow is, neatly put a foot on it and march along the rainbow bridge as if it were a solid object. People are sure that it cannot be done, that the rainbow is merely an apparition, a phenomenon that arises and then disappears again. They are convinced that they deal only with apparitions because they cannot come into contact with this aspect of the external world through their sense of touch and feeling. According to their view, as soon as something can be grasped or touched, it is no longer a phenomenon to the same degree, even though recent philosophy may in some instances claim that it is. In any case, the impressions of the sense of touch, for instance, are intuitively taken as something that guarantees a different external reality than the phenomenal realities of the rainbow.

This notwithstanding, all that our external senses perceive comprises merely a world of phenomena, modified perhaps in respect to the apparition of the rainbow, but a world of phenomena nevertheless. Regardless of how far we direct our gaze, how far we can hear, in whatever is seen, heard or otherwise perceived, we deal only with phenomena. I have attempted to explain this in the introduction to the third volume of Goethe's scientific writings.⁵ We deal with a tapestry of phenomena. Whoever makes an effort through experimentation or any combination of pure reasoning to find matter in the realm of appearances is pursuing a dead end.^T2 There is no matter out there. One deals only with a world of phenomena.

This is precisely what the whole spirit of spiritual science reveals: In the external world, one deals only with a world of appearances. An exponent of a current world outlook will therefore conclude that it is wrong to look for matter at all in the realm of phenomena. Anthroposophy cannot agree with this attitude; it must put it differently by saying: Because of the whole configuration of man's mind, he comes to the point where he wants to seek for matter in the moving tapestry of phenomena, to seek out there for atoms, molecules and so on, which are resting points in the phenomenon. Some picture these as tiny, miniature pellets, others imagine them to be points of energy and are proud of the fact; others, prouder still, think of them as mathematical fiction.

What is important, however, is not whether one thinks of them as small pellets, sources of energy, or mathematical fiction, but whether one thinks of the external world in atomistic terms. This is what is important. For a spiritual scientist, however, it is not merely wrong to think atomistically. The kind of concept determining rightness or wrongness may be sound logic, but it is abstract, and spiritual science has to do with realities. I urge you to take it very seriously when I say that spiritual science has to do with realities!

This is why certain concepts that have become merely logical categories for today's abstract world-view must be replaced by something real. This is why, in spiritual science, we not only say that one who seeks atoms or molecules in the external world thinks in the wrong way; we must consider this manner of thinking an unhealthy, sick thinking. We must replace the merely logical concept of wrongness with the realistic concept of sickness, of unhealthiness. We must point to a definite sickness of soul—regardless of how many people it has seized—which expresses itself in atomistic thinking. This condition is one of feeblemindedness. It is not merely logically wrong for us, it is an expression of feeblemindedness to think atomistically; in other words, it is feebleminded to seek in the external world something other than phenomena which, when it comes right down to it, are an a par with the phenomenon of the rainbow. It is relatively easy for people with other world outlooks to set things straight: they do it by refutation. To have been able to refute something is considered an accomplishment. Yet, in a spiritual-scientific sense, no final conclusion has been reached by refutation; it is important to refer to the healthy or unhealthy soul life, to actual processes expressed in man's whole physical, soul and spiritual being. To think atomistically is to think unhealthily, not merely erroneously. An actual unhealthy process takes place in the human organism when we think atomistically. This is one thing we must become clear about regarding the phenomena of the external world and its character of appearance.

We must also become clear about our inner life. Many people seek the spirit inwardly. To begin with, the spiritual cannot be found in the inner realm of man. Truly objective evaluation of every abstract form of mysticism bears this out. What today is sometimes—nay, often—called mysticism consists of brooding over one's inner self, attempting to seek self-knowledge by introverted brooding. What is discovered by practicing such one-sided mysticism? One certainly finds interesting things. When we look into the human being and find all those inwardly pleasant experiences arising which we call mystical—what are they really? They are just the very things that point us toward material existence. We do not discover matter in the external world where the sense phenomena are found; we come upon matter in our inner being. This brings us to the point where we can characterize these things correctly. Regarded from the most comprehensive point of view, it is the body's metabolism that seethes and boils there within the human interior and which flames up into consciousness as one-sided mysticism, mistaken by many to be the spirit that can be found in the inner self. It is not the spirit, it is the flame of metabolism within man. We find matter not in the external world, we find it in ourselves. We find it precisely through one-sided mysticism. That is why a great many people who do not want to be materialists deceive themselves. They excuse their not wanting to be materialists by saying, “Out there is base matter; I shall rise above it and turn to my inner being, for there I will find the spirit.”

Actually, spirit is neither without nor within. Outside are the interweaving phenomena; within ourselves is matter, constantly seething and boiling substance. This metabolic processing of matter kindles the flames that leap into consciousness and form the mystic impressions. Mysticism is the inwardly perceived corporeal matter of the metabolism. That is something that cannot be logically refuted, but must be traced back to actual processes when man yields in a one-sided way to the metabolism.

Just as the belief that it is possible to find traces of matter in the external world indicates feeblemindedness—that is, a real illness of the spirit, soul and bodily being of man—so does one-sided preoccupation with mysticism indicate a corporeal indisposition. It points toward something that sounds somewhat insulting if put bluntly. Yet we must use an expression that is, as it were, spoken from yonder side of the Guardian of the Threshold and means, “Childishness.” In the same way that one incurs feeblemindedness through atomistic thinking concerning the outer world, one becomes childish when yielding to a mysticism that wants to feel the spirit in the seething of the inner metabolism.

Childishness, of course, has a good side, too. When we observe the child we see a lot of spirit in it, and geniality in many instances consists in man's preserving the childlike spirit all the way into advanced age. When we look at the world from the other side of the threshold we can see that it is the spirit which, for instance, forms the child's brain, that spirit which accompanies us from the spiritual world when we enter the physical world through conception or birth. This spirit is most active in the child. Later, it is lost. Therefore, the word childishness is not meant as an insult in this instance, it merely denotes that spirit which forms the brain out of a more or less chaotic mass. Later on, however, if this spirit, which actually shapes the child's brain, does not pour itself sufficiently into logicality, into experience, into what life presents; if, instead, it acts in a one-sided manner and excludes the individual physical experiences; if it goes on working in the way it did during the first seven years, then instead of becoming intellectually mature one becomes childish. Childishness is frequently found to be a characteristic of a great many mystics, particularly arrogant ones. They wish to weave and live in that spirit which is really what should be active in the child's organism. They have retained this spirit, however, and, greatly impressed by their own accomplishment, they gaze at it in wonder in their consciousness, believing, in their one-sided, abstract mysticism, that they are perceiving a higher spirituality, when it is only the matter of their own metabolism.

Again, we do not need merely to refute the one-sided mystic if we are really well grounded in an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We must show that it is the sign of an ailing constitution of the spirit, soul and body when man broods one-sidedly within his inner being, thereby attempting to find the spirit.

I have drawn these two examples, familiar to you from anthroposophical literature, in order to point out to you how serious from a certain viewpoint matters can become when, leaving the ordinary spiritual life of today, one immerses oneself in anthroposphical spiritual life. There, one no longer deals with something as insignificant as “right” or “wrong.” It now becomes a question of “healthy” or “sick” conditions in the organic functions. Thus, on a higher level, something that goes in one direction must be considered healthy, while something going in another direction must be considered sick. I would like you to understand from these implications how spiritual science is an active knowledge; how it cannot stand still on the level of the nature of ordinary knowledge but becomes something real. The process of knowledge, insofar as it expresses itself in spiritual science, is something that actually takes place in the human organism.

In a similar manner we must define the element that lives in the realm of will. When we talk of the realm of will in our age—an age permeated by that grandiose decline we have often discussed—when we speak of what develops into human will impulses and try to define their character, then we say: Man is good or evil. Again, we are dealing with ethical categories—good and evil—which are just as necessary, of course, as logical categories. Yet, from what arises out of the impulses of spiritual science, it is not merely a question of what is meant when one action of man is designated as good and another as evil. When one calls a human action good, even in a karmic connection, it is a question of balancing in some way or other the good with the evil. We refer to something that pertains to an ethical judgment of man.

Whenever we rise into the realm of the spiritual scientific, it is much more a question of recognizing that what is at work there is a certain manner of thinking, feeling and willing for human beings which leads upward to a fruitful development, to progress in evolution. On the one hand, we have abstract goodness. It is of outstanding moral value, but even that is ethically abstract. When it is a matter of spiritual-scientific impulses, however, man must not only do good, or only do the good which lets him appear as an ethically good person. He can do, think or feel only that which advances the world in its development in the external sense world; or he can do something that is not merely evil, leading to an ethical condemnation, but has a destructive effect on the world forces. This was already meant to be indicated in the Portal of Initiation,⁶ where Strader and Capesius are speaking and the following is pointed out: Everything that is done here in the sense world and is subject to ethical judgments of good and evil turns into phenomena behind the curtains of existence, having either a progressive, constructive effect or a destructive one, leading to decline. Just try to experience this entire scene that is permeated with thunder and lightning, where things are happening in a most realistic manner in the soul world while Capesius and Strader are discussing one or the other matter. Try to re-experience this scene and you will see how what we experience as the ethical sphere here on the physical plane is in reality very different there.

All this is to show you how serious world aspects become in that instance when, upon leaving today's customary way of judging by logical or outward human categories only, one ascends to the realities that confront us when we view the world from the spiritual scientific standpoint. Things become serious, yet they must be mentioned today because the world now demands a new kind of spiritual life. Things are happening in the world today that everyone sees but that nobody wishes to comprehend in their actual significance because one cannot take the step from external abstraction to reality. I want to give you a few other examples.

You find today that you live in a world where, among much else, there exist, for example in the social field, a great many party organizations—liberal, conservative and many other parties. Human beings are unaware of the actual nature of these parties. When they have to vote, they decide on one or the other party. They do not give much thought to what it really is that exists as party policy, pulsating through all of public life. They are incapable of taking these things seriously. There are quite a number of people who, in the nicest superficial manner, repeat all sorts of Orientalisms about the external world as Maya, but when it really comes to doing something in this external world they do not stick to what they repeat so abstractly. Otherwise, they would ask, “Maya? Then these parties must be Maya too. Then what is the reality to which this Maya points?”

If this matter is pursued in a spiritual-scientific way in more detail—and tomorrow we shall go deeper into this topic—one finds that these parties exist in the external world by having programs and principles, that is, they pursue abstract ideas. Everything that lives in the external physical world, however, is always the replica, the reflection of what is present as a reality in a much more intense form in the spiritual world. Here is the physical world (see drawing, red), but everything in it points toward the spiritual, and only above, in the spiritual world, can the actual reality of these physical things be found (red). Down here, for instance, you find the parties (orange). On the earth, they oppose each other, seeking to gather a great number of people under the umbrella of an abstract program. Then what are these parties a reflection of? What is up there in the spiritual world if these parties down here are Maya? No abstractions exist in the spiritual world above, only beings. Yet, political parties are rooted in abstraction. Above, one cannot profess adherence to a party program; there one can only be a follower of this or that being or hierarchy. There one cannot just subscribe to a program on the basis of the intellect; that cannot happen there. One must belong with one's whole being to another entity. What is abstract down here is being above that is, the abstract below is only the shadow of beingness above. If you consider the two main categories of parties, the liberal and conservative, you know that each has its own program. When you look above to see what each is a reflection of, then you discover that ahrimanic being is projected here (see drawing, lower part) into the conservative views, luciferic being in the liberal thoughts. Down here, one follows a liberal or conservative program; up there, one is a follower of an ahrimanic or a luciferic being of some hierarchy.

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It can happen, however, that the moment you pass across the threshold it becomes necessary really to understand all this clearly, and neither be fooled by words nor succumb to illusions. It is quite easy to assume that one belongs to a certain good being. Just because you call a being good, however, does not make it so. Anyone can say, for instance, “I acknowledge Jesus, the Christ,” but in the spiritual world, one cannot follow a program. The whole manner in which the concepts and images of this Jesus, of Christ, fill such a person's soul indicates that it is merely the name of Jesus, the Christ, that he has in mind. Actually he is a follower of either Lucifer or Ahriman, but calls whichever it is by the name of Jesus or Christ.

I ask you: How many people today know that party opinions are shadows of realities in the spiritual world? Some do know and act according to their knowledge. I can point to some who know. The Jesuits, for instance, they know. Do not think that the Jesuits believe that when they write something⁶ against anthroposophy in their journals, for instance, they have hit upon something special and logically irrefutable. Refutations are not what counts there. The Jesuits know very well how their refutations could be countered. They are not concerned with a rational fighting for or against something, but with being followers of a certain spiritual being which I do not wish to name today, but which they call Jesus, their Leader, to whom they belong. Whoever this being may be, they call it Jesus. I do not wish to go into the facts more closely, but they call themselves soldiers and him their Leader. They do not fight to refute, they fight to recruit adherents for the companies, the army of Jesus—that is, the being they call Jesus. And they know very well that as soon as one Looks across the threshold, abstract categories, logical approval or disapproval no longer matter, only the hosts following one or the other being. Down on earth it is a matter of mere figures of speech. This is what mankind today is hardly willing to understand, namely, that if we wish to escape from the decline of our age it can no longer be a question of abstractions or merely of what one may think, but that we must deal with realities. We shall begin to ascend to realities when we stop talking about right or wrong and begin speaking about healthy or sick. We begin to rise to realities when we cease talking about programs of parties or world views, and instead speak about following real beings whom we encounter as soon as we become aware of what exists an yonder side of the threshold. It must be our concern today actually to take that serious step that leads from abstraction to reality, from merely logical knowledge to knowledge as deed. This alone can lead us out of the chaos now gripping the world.

The world situation, about which we shall speak tomorrow and the day after, can be judged in a sound way only by someone who examines it with the means that spiritual science is prepared to give him. Otherwise one will be unable to see in the right light the significant, existing contrasts between East and West. All that outwardly manifests itself in visible realities—what else is it but the inherently absurd expression of what lives as thoughts in people's heads? How, then, do these thoughts manifest themselves to us?

To answer this question and to conclude today's presentation, I would like again to call our attention to an obvious example. More than once, I have pointed out how Catholic clerical factions, especially here in Switzerland, are now resorting to a web of lies in order to destroy spiritual science. Those of you who have been here have witnessed a number of examples of what the Catholic Jesuits come up with in the attempt to destroy anthroposophy. Consider the attacks made by Jesuit seminarists with weapons that are certainly not nice. I need not characterize this; those who have not informed themselves can easily do so.

For Switzerland and Central Europe, where these things happen, are all part of the world. So, too, is America. I recently received a magazine published in America in which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is characterized, while, at the same time, the Jesuits in Europe denounced spiritual science as a threat to the Catholic Church and to Christianity. You know by now that Reverend Kully⁷ stated that there are three evils in the world. One is Judaism, the other Freemasonry, but the third—worse than all of them, even worse than Bolshevism—is what is taught here in Dornach. This originates from the Catholic side, and is how anthroposophy is characterized.

What about America? I want to read you a small paragraph from an American publication written at the same time Catholic journals over here printed their view of anthroposophy:

Just as the Catholic hierarchy has always insisted that the Roman church is the only one with any authority,

—Protestant sects do not come into consideration; according to the Roman church, these sects stand outside the gates; they are viewed merely as a great number of heretics?

so it is self-evident that the church which Steiner's glib tongue alludes to can be none other than the Roman Catholic church. This assumption is reinforced and indeed any doubt about the matter ceases, when one reads Steiner's other occult books. They all point to the same thing, namely, his writings are purely misleading; the sheepskin of a superficial occultism covering the wolf of Jesuitism.

So you see that in America anthroposophy is taken for Jesuitism, while in Europe the Jesuits strongly oppose anthroposophy as the biggest enemy of the Catholic church. That is how the world thinks today! That, however, is also how people think in Europe where they are living side by side; they are just not aware of it.

The American article concludes with several more nice sentences:

Steiner claims to be an initiate. That may be; but whether he is of the White Lodge or belongs to the Brothers of Shadow is something one can only decide when it is realized that he stood on the side of men of “blood and iron” ... and that a number of his students here (in America) were interned as German spies.

So you see, sometimes the wind blows from the Roman Catholic corner, sometimes from the American side! It just shows you how things are inside the heads of our contemporaries. Yet, from the thoughts hatched inside human heads, there developed what has led into the decline of the present, and the ascent must truly be sought in a different direction from the one where many seek it today.

Tomorrow, we shall continue with this subject.

• 1 . Reference to Rudolf Steiner's return from Stuttgart where, from July 24 until August 1, 1920, he had been giving lectures for the teachers of the Waldorf School, for the general public and the Anthroposophical Society.
• 2 . The Waldorf School: Founded by Emil Molt (1876–1936) in the year 1919 for the children of the workmen in the “Waldorf-Astoria” cigarette factory and the public as a coeducational elementary and high school under the leadership of Rudolf Steiner, who had also appointed the teachers and had given them preparatory courses.
• 3 . Dr. Walter Johannes Stein: 1891–1957, Dr. Caroline van Heydebrandt: 1866–1938; both teachers in the Waldorf School from 1919.
• T1. In the German educational system, the grade of 1 is equivalent to an A; 4 is a D and 5 would indicate a failing grade.
• 4 . See Preface and Introduction to Goethe's Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner. Introductions to all the volumes written by Rudolf Steiner under the same title, Dornach, 1926.
• 5 . Rudolf Steiner: “The Portal of Initiation” contained in Four Mystery Play, GA 14 (Toronto, Steiner Book Centre, 1973).
• T2. The “dead end” alluded to here is the translation of the German expression “Holzweg,” literally, “wooden path.” Like all such expressions in a language, it springs from real experience. The “Holzweg” is a rough timber road, or a system of such roads, proceeding into the forest and used by woodcutters. It leads nowhere and may dead-end suddenly. Hence, it would be easy to get lost on it.
• 6 . “Stimmen der Zeit,” Freiburg i. Br., 1918–1920, Otto Zimmermann SJ, Josef Kreitmaier SJ, Konstantin Nopels SJ.
• 6 . “Stimmen der Zeit,” Freiburg i. Br., 1918–1920, Otto Zimmermann SJ, Josef Kreitmaier SJ, Konstantin Nopels SJ.
• 7 . Max Kully: 1878–1936, Catholic minister of Arlesheim near Basle. Reference to a calumnious article against Rudolf Steiner that he wrote in a Catholic Sunday paper, July 6, 1920.

Yesterday, I indicated in a certain context what it is that party opinions here on the physical plane actually represent. Since life today is actually ruled by party programs of all different shadings, it is essential to become more aware of their nature. I also mentioned that in this abstract age certain people are inclined at least to profess the maxim: All the phenomena that can be perceived with the senses or comprehended with ordinary reasoning are Maya. Yet, when it becomes a matter of comprehensively applying to life such a general, abstract truth, which people claim to embrace, the vital link connecting most persons' souls to life's realities today tears apart, as it were. Party opinion, too, must be regarded as a reflection of something that is of supersensory nature, having its reality in the spiritual world. It only has its image here in the physical world, just as natural phenomena, for example, even the most complex ones, must be acknowledged as such in regard to physical man. I already explained yesterday that party opinions are formed because a group of people flock to a more or less clearly defined abstract party program. A number of demands are raised; they are supposed to be fulfilled by one or another means; people do one thing or another—mostly, they talk about this or that—to help such programs, such party views, to become reality. Groups of people gathering under the flag of an abstract idea which they hope can be realized, that is what constitutes a party.

One who examines all this more closely, particularly from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, is not so much concerned with the nature of the programs, because he first has to examine this aspect in its context with the world. His primary concern is with the external phenomenon of people forming into groups.

I said yesterday that when ascending from the physical plane into the higher worlds beyond the threshold, no abstractions exist, no abstract demands exist as posed in party programs. Instead, as soon as one has crossed the threshold, having passed the Guardian of the Threshold without lingering there as so many are inclined to do, one finds that only beings exist beyond the threshold. It is not possible to follow a program; one can only follow one or another being. One cannot group around an abstract idea, only around this or that being. While mankind is in great need of such knowledge, it is precisely this insight that men are vehemently rebelling against. At present, to gather under the umbrella of an abstract idea and to yearn for the realization of abstract programs is dear to people's hearts. To understand that abstract programs can only exist in the physical world and that something that can be grasped in abstract ideas can only be subject to the physical realm is something that people do not wish to comprehend, for it would be troublesome. I draw a line here, denoting the threshold (see drawing). Here are the party groups (blue circles) and here, their programs (X). This illustrates how people gather under party programs. Yet, since these programs correspond to certain beings in the supersensory world (orange), all those adhering to a party view link themselves with certain beings of the higher world. What is merely an image in the physical world corresponds to groupings around a being in the super-sensible world (red circles).

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It must be emphasized that this knowledge is an absolute necessity for a prosperous development in the future, because instinct must be replaced increasingly by awareness, if humanity is to progress in its evolution. A remnant of an old instinctive group mentality causes men today to congregate under the umbrella of party programs. They believe that by what they do in such groupings, by massing together and professing to the corresponding program, by actions or mostly words done or spoken for the sake of realizing this program, all possible avenues have been explored. People claim to belong to a certain party, a socialist, a liberal party, a women's movement, or a party of a spiritualistic nature, and so on. If I were to enumerate just a small segment of all the parties existing today, my lecture this evening would become much too drawn out. Because people nurture the belief that the nature of their activities here on the physical plane is fulfilled by what they do and say within a party, they unconsciously follow a being in the supersensory world whom they do not wish to know. Just because men do not know something does not make it any less real. Even if neither the liberal professing to liberal party views nor the one belonging to a women's rights group knows that he follows certain supersensory beings, this does not mean that he is not actually doing so. In reality, he is part of their entourage. Thereby, he counteracts the whole spirit of progressive evolution in our age, for that spirit demands the transformation of all instinctive, unconscious and subconscious elements into fully conscious intentions, into conscious action, word and thought.

Of course, we are also familiar with older groupings of people, groups with racial connections; and we know, too, of other groups, leading even today an ephemeral, shadowy, but nevertheless noisy and deluded existence—the groupings into nations. We know them well! If you recall the lecture cycle on the nature of folk souls which I gave in Kristiania in 1910,⁸ you will find that one cannot remain on the physical plane if one wishes to examine carefully these relationships of races and nations. It becomes necessary to ascend into the higher worlds. We outlined in those lectures how such groups of people are held together and guided by beings from the hierarchy of archangels. We saw also that in such groupings into nations, super-sensible entities are present among human beings.

If we now picture in our minds the difference between the relationship of racial and national groups of people to their super-sensible beings, and the relationship of parties to their super-sensible beings, we find that the former are able instinctively to manifest and transform into reality the impulses given them by the beings belonging to them in the higher world. In this case, it is fully justified that instinctive observance of the impulses of these super-sensible beings holds sway. Mankind had to struggle to rise above this instinctive obedience to super-sensible beings. It goes without saying that humanity could not consciously follow the folk spirits, the archangels, from the beginning, but instinctive forces instead had to permeate this allegiance. In a sense, human beings could only be educated gradually to a conscious state.

The farther back one traces mankind's evolutionary history, the more one discovers that ancient people had a clearly defined, albeit instinctive, awareness in following such super-sensible beings as a group, a nation or a race. Certainly, during the middle epoch preceding our present age, Such awareness was partially lost. More and more, men had to forgo their knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, but the farther we go into ancient history, the more we find that men instinctively interpreted their sense of belonging together as a race by the fact that they recognized a spiritual, super-sensible entity as their leader. In former times, even if a human leader was recognized by groups of men, the greatest part of his followers clearly sensed that the folk spirit was embodied in him. They felt that what they beheld as the external human form was in a sense possessed by their super-sensible leader. One may view this any way one likes, one may even consider it an old superstition. Those, however, who think differently about so-called superstitions need only wait and see whether, by the year 3000, our zoology, chemistry and botany may not also be viewed as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century superstition by those whose mentality is on par with those who speak of these other matters today as old superstitions.

Now, what is the difference between the way these groups stand in regard to their spiritual guidance, and the Position party opinions find themselves in with respect to their spiritual counterpart? The ancients did not have party programs that were derived by outlining abstract ideas. It would have ill behooved a Ghengis Khan or a Timur Khan, and others like them, to present their people with something like an abstract party program such as the present Ghengis Khan, who is called Lenin today, interposes between himself and his cohorts. There is a significant contrast. The great khans of the former Mongols were without programs, but those possessing insight perceived in them the living incarnations of super-sensible beings. The great khans of the present, Lenin and Trotsky,⁹ carry within their souls an abstract party program, not an awareness of being heralds of a higher being. This makes a considerable difference because it indicates that the yes-men below the leaders in the party affairs have only abstract ideas in their minds and consciously deny to themselves that they are part of the fellowship of a higher spiritual being.

Only a few groups of men do not function on that level. I introduced one of them, the Jesuits, to you yesterday. The Jesuits do not get involved in childish nonsense such as party programs. Read the series of lectures I delivered in Karlsruhe, From Jesus to Christ,¹⁰ a series that has somehow come into the hands of the local clergy. There, you can read about the exercises a Jesuit must subject himself to before he can properly assume his post. The Jesuit is not charged with any party program, no demands are dressed up for him in abstract formulations. He is shown through exercises how to follow his spiritual leader; he is trained to know himself to be in the entourage of a super-sensible being. This is also the case in a few other more or less secret modern groups. It also holds true for those involved in the major political activities of the West, political activities which are literally, step by step, turning out just as these exponents of certain Western occult politics have envisioned them for a long time. What really matters, however, is that we pay heed to the spirit of progress in our age, that an awareness is regained of the link between man and the spiritual world and of the relationship between all that man does here on earth and events and living beings of that realm. We should seek out those beings in the spiritual world who participate in the constitution and guidance of our world so that we can know into whose following we enter through our various actions. Today one cannot do anything that benefits the actual progress of mankind if, apart from becoming aware of the connection to the spiritual world regarding egotistic inner soul needs, one does not become fully aware that through one's outward actions, expressed for example in party opinions and the like, a connection with the higher worlds is created as well. Spiritual science should not merely reassure our souls, so to speak, concerning the narrowly confined affairs of our individual personality; it is supposed to produce impulses for shaping all of life. This was the recurrent theme of my recent lectures. Humanity has arrived at abstraction and must find its way out of it. We are deeply enmeshed in abstraction, particularly in regard to the so-called practical sides of life, especially in party functions. We must shed this abstract nature if the recent European debacle is not to become a total catastrophe. In all areas, it is a matter of looking in the right direction.

We must above all consider something I mentioned before my trip to Stuttgart to a number of you sitting here. It is something that I would like to repeat today for the sake of the numerous foreign guests who are present, and also because every opportunity must be seized to lend a voice to those ideas that have to pervade human souls in our age. Yesterday I said that what is practiced as spiritual science must be a completely different form of knowledge from the one customarily called knowledge. It must be knowledge that is action. One must be conscious of the fact that in striving after spiritual knowledge, one has to do with realities, not mere logical schemes. I also said that people today are used to saying: This person is an advocate of materialism; materialism is wrong; hence, he must be refuted. One believes that something has been proven by refutation. I cited examples of how such concepts of right and wrong must yield to the much more real concepts of healthy and sick in the realm of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. “Healthy” and “sick” indicate actual conditions in human life. We do not merely recognize right or wrong knowledge, we recognize healthy and sick knowledge. By shedding the proclivity for abstraction we enter deeply into the sphere of concrete reality.

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We must consider all this from a still higher perspective. We know from the many books on anthroposophy that man is composed of a soul-spiritual part (blue) and a physical part (red), as illustrated in my sketch. We know that certain theoretical materialists of the nineteenth century felt that it was entirely unnecessary to speak of soul and spirit elements because they had nothing to do with human knowledge. They held that what dwells as thinking, feeling, and willing in the so-called human soul is merely the result of the physical nervous system and the brain. You know that we must differentiate between this theoretical materialism and the practical materialism which, to this day, still holds sway in a particularly crass form. It differs entirely from theoretical materialism which reached its peak in the nineteenth century. A person who is only used to the ideas prevalent today will disagree with the sort of materialism which maintains that human thoughts, feelings and impulses of will are merely the product of the nervous system and the brain. He feels that this opinion must be refuted. Once he has done so he believes that he has proven that man does not merely consist of a physical body with a nervous system and brain, but that he also has a soul and spirit. Spiritual science, however, cannot be content merely with this refutation, for it is not only a science bent on a logical course, but one dealing with realities. All that lives in the physical world is a replica of the world of soul and spirit, but not only in the sense of a picture one paints upon a wall. The physical world in all its activities and expressions of life is also a reflection of the higher world.

In the case of the human being, we observe that man descends from the soul-spiritual world through conception and birth into the physical realm. The configuration of forces that he brings along from the world of soul and spirit goes to work on the physical body which is taken over from the hereditary stream. This body with its entire configuration is developed by the descending soul and spirit forces. Not only is it developed in regard to its outer form but also in that of its inner functions. Consequently, everything surrounding you in the external sense world can be thought about very well simply with the brain. For, in regard to its faculties, this brain is also an image of soul and spirit. One who only confines himself to the absorption of what the outer sense world or modern science offers thinks only with the brain; he is merely matter that thinks. No objection can be made about this; he is just thinking-matter. Today, the time has come to transcend the state of being merely thinking-matter. One can accomplish this by thinking thoughts that have not been acquired from the sense world, such as anthroposophically oriented thoughts. Those who wish to adhere exclusively to the sense world consider these anthroposophical thoughts to be crazy, unreal and fantastic. This is because the moment they are called upon to think these thoughts they have to make a strenuous effort. They have to break free in their thinking, but they wish to think these thoughts with their brain. Yet, with the brain, one can only think the external physical thoughts, thoughts about the physical realm. One can think about atoms and molecules quite well with this brain in the feeble-minded manner I outlined yesterday. By means of this brain, however, it is not possible to think the thoughts presented in such a book as Occult Science, an Outline.¹¹ Thus, anthroposophy is regarded as sheer fantasy. A considerable effort of will must be made to free the soul-spiritual. Then, one can think those thoughts and no longer finds them absurd or fantastic, but in full harmony with life.

In the course of the last centuries, however, since the middle of the fifteenth century, mankind reached a point where, in a sense, it increasingly sank down into itself. It permitted the soul-spiritual aspects to fall asleep and allowed itself to become immersed in the substantiality of the corporeal element. People were content to think merely with the physical brain, to set the brain on an automatic course, just as the brain of the professor, sitting at his lectern, functions automatically. The brain automaton above is followed below by the brain automata of the students. Whole groupings of human beings switched over to this merely automatic materialistic functioning of the brain, namely, physical thinking. They sank deeper and deeper into the corporeality, and did not activate themselves from within to quicken the comprehension for what is derived from the super-sensible world. This has been the growing trend among the people of the so-called civilized world since the middle of the fifteenth century. And by the middle of the nineteenth century, just that particular segment of humanity which is called intellectual in the civilized parts of Europe and America had turned into physical thinkers.

Now, when Büchner, Moleschott or the weighty Vogt¹² appeared on the scene and began to think a little, unaware of the fact that behind their own thinking was something that should have given them a jolt, they observed their contemporaries and, interpreting them quite correctly, concluded: Individualism, spiritualism—wrong; it is the brain that thinks! Indeed, it was only brains that were thinking; materialism was quite correct. This is just the secret; the theoretical materialists of the nineteenth century stated nothing wrong; on the contrary, they were right. It would even have been an insult for colleague X to have claimed that colleague Y was endowed with soul and spirit, because in all truth X could only say concerning Y that a brain was thinking automatically. Nineteenth century materialism was therefore basically correct, for it referred to a certain stage of human evolution characterized by the fact that human beings have become body-bound and that their thinking, along with feeling and willing, arises out of materiality. Then even mystics came along who had steeped themselves in their inner being, but these mystics actually only observed the inner seething of substance within the skin until it became flames and flared up into consciousness.

Spiritual science would be in the wrong if it were now to take a merely logical standpoint. It may not say that materialism is incorrect and needs to be refuted. Such refutation is the favorite pastime of our age of abstraction. Spiritual science must do things by its knowledge. Hence, first of all, the mere refutation of materialism does not hold true for people who have become body-bound. Secondly, nothing is accomplished by merely disproving materialism. Instead, it is a matter of motivating people to shake themselves free of the Bonds of materiality and to nurture and cultivate thoughts that follow the course of super-sensible results of research. Materialism is not to be disproved, it is to be overcome! Human beings must once again become soul-spiritual by awakening their own soul-spiritual being. It must be through action that real materialism is overcome; not through some sort of erroneous refutation. The sad fact is not that materialism is a mistaken world-view, but that it has become right for the recent cultural development. It therefore cannot be a matter of contradicting a false world-view. Rather, it is a matter of giving human beings the means whereby they may perform soul deeds that overcome the body-bound condition of humanity so that they Break free of materiality. The knowledge referred to here must be action, not mere logic. This is the issue.

However, people have a hard time comprehending the difference between mere bantering in negations or affirmations while remaining in the sphere of abstract concepts, and the element of action that flows directly from the well-spring of the spirit. Just try to clarify to yourselves that it is one thing merely to refute materialism logically because you are of the opinion that it is wrong, and quite another to facilitate the healing process through spirituality by overcoming the quite real materialism which has gripped mankind as a disease. This difference must be recognized, for what matters today is that spiritual deeds are accomplished and carried into social life as well. There is a fundamental difference between self-satisfaction in a theoretical worldview and the active involvement in knowledge that turns into action.

Attention must be focused on this matter so that we become aware of the difference between anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and other similar endeavors; for this spiritual science must be comprehended as something that actually relates to the tangible forces of ascent and decline in social life.

If we turn our attention to Eastern Europe we can see how the Russian character, concerning which Western and Central Europeans hardly form any proper concepts, is being infiltrated by something that Europeans can very well understand even though they abhor the Leninism and Trotskyism that are spreading out over Russia. There are many people who believe that this Leninism and Trotskyism have something in common with what is to arise eventually in the East. Far from it! These movements only have something in common with the decline of the East and its further ruin. They are purely destructive forces and what is to arise in the East must develop in opposition to these forces of annihilation. Let me illustrate this. Here, in the East, we have something fundamental (see sketch, green) which is given little attention today. During the past few years, Bolshevism, Leninism and Trotskyism have spread over the East as destructive forces (white). What I have indicated here in green is trying to surface. Leninism and Trotskyism are merely the continuation of the old czarism and, as I have mentioned before, Lenin is the new czar, only in different attire, but basically the same thing. Czarism becomes Leninism, although as czarism it dies in Leninism. In the East, elements opposing czarism have for centuries tried to work their way to the surface. These elements only misunderstand their own existence if they make concessions, in any form, to Leninism and Trotskyism. This is happening all the way into Asia. People have yet to realize the magnitude of the coming upheavals; this is only a lull between the last catastrophe and the next one. The souls sleeping during this respite will have a rude awakening one day; they will rub their eyes and pull off their sleeping caps when the catastrophe continues on its course. Yet, what will work its way to the surface despite all this is the village community. Only a person who understands the nature of the individual village communities comprehends what is trying to emerge in the East as a social constitution. The village community is the only reality in the East. All the rest is but an institution that is perishing.

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It will be the task of people in the West to understand the means by which this aggregate of the village community can be organized. Indeed, it is only by the threefold social organism that the crumbling web of Western opinions in single human individualities can also be organized.¹³ On the one hand, the threefold social organism must incorporate the individual members of the Eastern village communities. On the other hand, it must save from ruin the crumbling Western organisms that are becoming individualized and which, as aggregates, are Splitting up into their separate components.

In regard to the immediate future, the so-called civilized world faces only two options: Bolshevism on one side, and the threefold social order on the other. He who does not recognize that only these two alternatives exist in the near future understands nothing of the course of events on a grand scale. Yet a real comprehension of these matters can only be attained by trying to apply the inner training, acquired by man through spiritual science, to the observation and the management of public social conditions.

Nowadays, one is always truly sorry when one sees people squander their spiritual potential in antiquated party programs. It is sad to see that people are so unwilling to understand that something truly new is needed in order to overcome the last remnant of the old, the ultrareactionism and conservatism, namely, Bolshevism. It will certainly not be overcome through the programs devised by today's statesmen from Middle and Western Europe. For these programs contain nothing of the element that must indwell any impulse of the future; nothing of the new spirit lives in them. Yet, this new spirit is needed. And if this new spirit is not present in the great political and cultural endeavors, then these efforts only serve to let mankind slide into further catastrophes. Likewise, if this new spirit is not contained in the party views, humanity will slip down into more calamities.

It is this that must now be considered and thought over in all sorts of forms. One is asked the following question again and again, “Well, the threefold social order is fine, but how will this or that turn out when this order has actually been introduced into the social organism?” The grocer, for instance, wonders how he will sell his wares when the threefold order comes into being, and so on. Only a while back, here in this auditorium, the question was raised how ownership of a sewing machine would be affected by the threefold social organism. If one is incapable of tackling the questions on the grand scale and is unable to realize that if they enter generally into the social life, the details will arrange themselves accordingly and assume their proper shape; if one is not in a Position to handle the major questions on a grand scale, one will never reach the summit of this age, which is a time of hard trials for mankind. For this reason, it is necessary today to be able to envisage a spiritual metamorphosis of the old cherished notions. In this connection, it is probably still so that if one were to examine the essay books of Middle European students at the end of a school term to see what sort of essays they had written, one would find among a large number of them the following essay title: “Each one must choose his hero in whose footsteps he works his way up to Olympus.”¹⁴ Young ladies of private schools, middle and high school students write beautiful essays on this theme. In real life, however, people run after abstract party programs. But even something poetic like the above, which certainly has its justification in the context of the poetic work from which it was taken, must also be read here in a spiritual metamorphosis. We must discover the way of looking into the spiritual world that leads to the spiritual beings under whom we gather together.

What was introduced as a conservative or a liberal program in earlier years and is seen today as a social-democratic or an agrarian program is all so much chitchat. It is all abstract formulation, as are the programs of all women's clubs and vegetarian organizations, etc. The really important thing is that one knows how the world process pulsates through the world's course and that one has an answer for what holds sway in the super-sensible sphere above when, for example, a certain group of people gathers together under some program for women's rights and so forth. Today, everything must be raised with the necessary earnestness to the vantage point of the spiritual, super-sensible world, for only by viewing the higher world together with the sense world is it possible to find what it is that can truly bring about progress for us in our age of great affliction and bitter trials.

• 8 . Rudolf Steiner: The Mission of the Folk-Souls, GA 121 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1970).
• 9 . Lenin: 1870–1924, founder and leader of Bolshevism; Trotski: 1879–1940, Lenin's closest associate.
• 10. Rudolf Steiner: From Jesus to Christ, GA 131 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973).
• 11. Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, an Outline, GA 13 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1972).
• 12. Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899) was a German philosopher, physiologist and physician who became one of the exponents of 19th-century scientific materialism.
  Jacob Moleschott (1822-1893) was a Dutch physiologist and writer on dietetics. He is known for his philosophical views in regard to scientific materialism.
  Carl Vogt (1817–1895) was a German scientist, philosopher, politician and populariser of science who published a number of notable works on zoology, geology and physiology.
• 13. Rudolf Steiner: Towards Social Renewal, GA 23 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977).
• 14. Words by Pylades in Goethe's play, “Iphigenie auf Taurus.”

Today, I should like to add depth to what has recently been discussed by linking it to an old theme already familiar to many of you. Years ago, I once characterized the totality of the human senses.¹⁵ You know that in speaking of the senses one usually lists sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. In more recent times, even some scientists have been driven to refer to other senses that are located, as it were, further within man, a sense of balance, and so on. This whole concept of the human senses lacks coherence, however, and, above all, inner integration. When we focus on the conventionally enumerated senses, we actually are always dealing only with one part of the human sense organization. It is not until twelve senses are taken into consideration that we have completely explored the sensory organization of man. First of all, we wish today to enumerate and to describe briefly these twelve senses.

Since one can begin anywhere with the enumeration and characterization of the senses, let us start, for instance, by considering the sense of sight. First, we will consider its nature in an external way that everyone can substantiate for himself. The sense of sight transmits to us the surface of external corporeality which confronts us in color, brightness or darkness. We might describe these surfaces in a great variety of ways to arrive at what the sense of sight mediates. If we now penetrate through sense perception into the inner being of external corporeality, if, through our sense organization, we convey to ourselves what does not lie on the surface but continues more into the interior of the body, then this must take place through the sense of warmth. Again, drawn more closely to us, linked to us, inclined towards us from the surface of the corporeality, we perceive certain qualities through the sense of taste. It is located, as it were, on the other side of the sense of sight. When you consider colors, brightness and darkness, and when you consider taste, you will realize that what confronts you on the surface of corporeality is something mediated by the sense of sight. What meets you in the interplay with your own organism, what frees itself in a way through sensation from the surface and moves towards you, is mediated by the sense of taste.

Now let us imagine that you go still further into the inner corporeality than is possible through the sense of warmth and that you focus not only on what permeates a body from outside, but on what inwardly pervades it like warmth, that by its very nature is an inner quality of bodies. You strike a metal plate, for example, and hear its sound. You then perceive something of the substantiality of this metal plate, that is, of the inner metallic essence. When you perceive warmth the sense of warmth conveys to you what permeates the bodies as general warmth but certainly is within them; you perceive through the sense of hearing what is already bound up with the inner nature of things. If you go to the other side, you arrive at something that the body in question exercises upon you as an effect, but which is a much more inward quality than what is perceived through the sense of taste. Smelling is, materially speaking, much more inward than tasting. Tasting comes about by bodies just stimulating, as it were, our secretions which then unite themselves superficially with our inner being. Smelling signifies quite an important change in our inner being, and the mucous membrane of the nose is organized in a much more inward way, materially speaking of course, than the organs of taste.

If you penetrate still further into the interior of the outer bodily nature to where the external corporeality becomes more soul-like, you enter then through the sense of hearing into the nature of the metallic element; you arrive at what is, in a way, the soul of the latter, but you penetrate still further, particularly into the external, when you perceive not only with the sense of hearing but with the word sense, the speech sense. It is a total misconception to believe that with the sense of hearing we exhaust the contents of the word sense. One may well hear something but need not grasp the content of the words to the point where they are understood. Even in regard to the organic organization, a difference exists between the mere hearing of sounds and the perception of a word. The hearing of sound is transmitted through the ear; the perception of a word is mediated through other organs that are as much of a physical nature as are those transmitting the sense of hearing. We also penetrate deeper into the essence of something external when we understand it through the word sense than when we merely hear its inner nature through sound.

Mediation through the sense of touch is still more inward, already quite separate from the objects, much more so than is the case with the sense of smell. When you touch objects, you actually perceive only yourself. You touch an object and if it is hard it presses forcibly on you; if it is soft its pressure is only slight. You perceive nothing of the object, however; you sense only the effect upon yourself, the change in yourself. A hard object pushes your organs far back into you. You perceive this resistance as a change in your own organism when you perceive by means of the sense of touch. You see, do you not, that as we move in there with our inner sensing, we are going out of ourselves. With the sense of taste, we are only outside ourselves to a slight degree; with the sense of sight, we are further outside and on the surface of objects. Through the sense of warmth, we already penetrate into the body. We enter into its being even more so with the sense of hearing, and we are poured into its essence through the word sense. By contrast, we penetrate our own interior already somewhat with the sense of taste; this is more the case with the sense of smell and still more with that of touch. Then, if we press still further into our interior, we come upon a sense which is usually no longer mentioned, at least not often. It is a sense by which we differentiate between our standing up or lying down, and through which we perceive when we are standing on our two feet, that we are in a state of balance. This experience of equilibrium is transmitted by the sense of balance. There, we penetrate completely into our interior; we perceive the relationship of our own inner being to the world outside, within which we experience ourselves in a state of equilibrium. We perceive this, however, entirely within our inner being.

When we penetrate further into the external world than we can by means of the word sense, this occurs through the sense of thought. To perceive the thoughts of another being actually requires another sense organ differing from the mere word sense. On the other hand, if we penetrate still further into ourselves we find a sense that inwardly reveals to us whether we are at rest or in movement. We don't only observe whether we are remaining still or moving simply by virtue of the external objects moving past us; through the extension or retraction of our muscles and through the configuration of our body insofar as the latter changes when we move about, we can inwardly perceive to what extent we are in motion, and so forth. This happens through the sense of movement.

When we confront human beings, we not only perceive their thoughts but the ego itself. The ego, too, is not yet perceived when one merely perceives the thoughts. For the same reason that we separate the sense of hearing from that of sight, we must recognize a special ego sense upon entering into the more subtle configuration of the human organization—a sense with which to perceive an “I” or ego. When we penetrate the ego of another person with our perception, we go out of ourselves the most.

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When do we enter the most into ourselves? When, within the general feeling of life, we perceive what we always have as our consciousness in the waking condition; when we perceive that we are; when we experience ourselves inwardly; when we sense that we are we. All this is mediated by the life sense.

Here I have written down for you the twelve senses that constitute the complete sensory system. You can readily see from this that a certain number of our senses are directed more toward the outside, adapted more for penetrating the outer world. When we consider this circle (see drawing) the extent of our sense world, we can say: Ego sense, sense of thinking, word sense, sense of hearing, sense of warmth, sense of sight and sense of taste are the outwardly directed senses. On the other hand, where we predominantly perceive ourselves through the things and where we perceive more the effects of things in us, we have the remaining senses: Life sense, sense of movement, sense of balance, and the senses of touch and smell. They form more the sphere of man's inner being. They are senses that open themselves in an inward direction and, through perception of what is within, transmit to us our relationship to the cosmos (see dark blue area in drawing). Thus, when we have the complete system of the senses we can say: We have seven senses that are directed more toward the outside. The seventh sense is already doubtful—the sense of taste that stands right on the boundary between what refers to the external bodies and what they exercise upon us as an effect. The other five senses are senses that show us completely inward processes taking place within us, which are, however, effects of the external world upon us. Today, I should like to add the following to this systematic arrangement of the senses which is familiar to most of you.

You know that when man rises from the ordinary knowledge of the senses to higher knowledge he is able to do that by emerging out of his physical body with his soul-spiritual part. Then the higher forms of cognition appear, namely, Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. They have already been described in my Occult Science, an Outline and in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.¹⁶ You will easily be able to represent to yourselves, however, that since we have this membering of the senses before us, we are able to arrive at a special characterization of what perception of the higher worlds is. We emerge out of ourselves. But what boundary do we cross over then? If we remain within ourselves, our senses form our boundary. When we emerge out of ourselves, we penetrate outward through the senses. It is, of course, a matter of fact that when our soul-spiritual part leaves the corporeal sheath, it penetrates outward through the senses. We therefore pass through the external senses in an outward direction, through the senses of taste, sight, warmth, hearing, the word sense, the thought and ego senses. We shall see later what we reach when we penetrate inward through the other boundary where the senses open in the inward direction. So we penetrate through the senses to the outside when we leave our bodily boundary, as it were, with our soul-spiritual entity. Here, for example (indicating the drawing), we pass outward by the sense of sight. It signifies that we penetrate outward with our soul-spiritual being by leaving behind our organs of sight. Particularly, when we leave our corporeality through the eyes and move about the world, seeing with our soul eyes, yet leaving the physical eyes behind, we arrive in that region where Imagination holds sway (see drawing).

And when, through initiation, we are actually capable of penetrating through the eye in particular out into the spiritual world, then we attain to pure Imaginations, imaginations that are pictures, so to speak, just as the rainbow is a picture—pure pictorial imaginations weaving and living in the soul-spiritual realm.

When we pass out through the organ of taste, the pictures appear tinged with the last remnants of material existence. We can say that the imaginations are then colored, literally touched here and there with materiality. We do not have pure images as in the rainbow; we get something that is tinged, containing in a kind of image something like a last residue of material substance. We come to ghosts, real specters, when we depart the physical body through the organ of taste.

When one leaves the physical body through the sense of warmth, one also receives pictures that are tinged. The images that are otherwise as pure as the rainbow, for instance, appear so that they affect our soul in a certain way. This is what their tinge now consists of. In case of the organ of taste, the image becomes condensed, so to speak, into something spectral. On the other hand, when we emerge through the sense of warmth, we also attain to imaginations but to a kind that have sympathetic and antipathetic soul effects, affecting us with warmth or coldness of soul. These images, therefore, do not appear passively, as did the others; they appear warm or cold in terms of the soul.

Now when we leave our body through the ear, through the sense of hearing, we come out into the soul-spiritual world and experience Inspiration. Previously, here (indicating the drawing) we experienced imaginations tinged by what affects our soul. When we leave our body through the sense of hearing, we penetrate into the sphere of Inspiration. Although these senses are directed more to the outside, now, when we leave the body, what passes over from the sense of warmth to the sense of hearing penetrates more into our soul-spiritual inner being, for inspirations belong more to the inner nature of soul and spirit than do imaginations. We are closely touched, not only emotionally, but we feel ourselves permeated by inspirations. Just as we feel ourselves permeated corporeally by the air we inhale, so we feel our soul permeated by inspirations when we enter those regions where they are to be found upon leaving the body through the sense of hearing.

The inspirations are once again tinged when we leave the body through the word sense, the sense of speech. It is of particular importance for anyone who acquires a feeling for the sense of speech to become familiar with this organ, which is just as real in the physical organization as is the sense of hearing. When the soul and spirit leave the physical body through this organ, Inspiration is tinged with inner experience, with a feeling of oneness with the foreign being.

When we leave the body through the sense of thinking, we penetrate into the sphere of Intuition. And when we leave the body through the ego sense, the intuitions are tinged by the beingness of the spiritual outer world.

Thus, we penetrate more and more into the essence of the spiritual outer world as soon as we leave the body with our soul and spirit. More and more, we become aware that everything surrounding us is in fact the spiritual world. Man, however, is in a sense forced out of the spiritual world. What is behind the senses he only perceives when he leaves the body with his soul-spiritual being. What is perceived, however, is molded by the senses. Intuitions appear through the ego sense and the sense of thinking but only as impressions of intuitions; inspirations appear as impressions through the word sense and sense of hearing; imaginations appear through the sense of warmth and sight and, to a lesser degree, through the sense of taste, but toned down, taken and transformed into the sensory element. Schematically, one could sketch it like this. On the boundary is the perception of the sense world (red). If one emerges with one's soul and spirit, one penetrates into the spiritual world (yellow) through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. And what is to be perceived in imaginations, inspirations and intuitions is out there. Yet, as it penetrates us, it turns into our sense world.

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You see, there are no atoms out there as materialists imagine. Out there is the world of imaginative, inspired and intuitive elements, and as this world affects us, the impressions of it arise in the outward sense perceptions. From this you realize that when we penetrate through our skin which encloses the sense organs to the outside, as it were, but in the various directions in which the senses are effective, we arrive in the objective soul-spiritual world. Through the senses, which we have recognized as the ones opening to the outside, we penetrate into the external world.

Thus you see that when the human being enters into the outer world through his senses, when he crosses over the threshold—which, as you can see from all this, is quite near—in the direction of the external world, he penetrates into the objective world of soul and spirit. This is what we try to attain through spiritual science, namely to enter into this objective soul-spiritual world. We come into a higher sphere by penetrating through our outer senses into that which is covered for us by a veil within the sense world.

Just as we penetrate outward through the outer senses, what happens when we now penetrate into our inner nature through the inner senses, the life sense, the sense of movement, of balance, of touch and smell? Here, the matter is very different. Let us write down these inner senses once again: Sense of smell, touch, balance, movement and life. In everyday life, we do not actually perceive what occurs in the realm of these senses; it remains subconscious. What we do perceive with these senses is already radiated upward into the soul.

If this is the external spiritual world of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition (see drawing below, red), it shines its rays, in a manner of speaking, upon our senses. Through these senses, the sensory world is produced and placed before us. The external world of spirit is thus moved inward by one degree. What surrounds these senses, however, what stirs below in the corporeality (orange), is not directly perceived. Just as the objective outer world of spirit is not directly perceived but is perceived only in its condition of being pushed into our senses, so we do not directly perceive all that stirs in our body, but only what is pushed up into the soul region. One perceives the soul effects of these inner senses to a certain extent. You do not perceive the life processes themselves. What you do perceive of the life sense is what of it is expressed in a feeling of inner well-being pervading us in waking consciousness, which is something you are not aware of in sleep, and which is only disturbed when something within hurts us. It is the life sense normally radiating upward as a feeling of comfort that is disturbed through pain in the same way as an external sense is disturbed when a person has a hearing loss. Generally, however, the life sense is experienced in a healthy person as a feeling of being comfortable. This feeling of overall well-being, which is heightened after a good meal, and somewhat lowered by hunger, this undefined inner sense of self is the effect of the life sense that has rayed into the soul.

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The sense of movement is expressed in what takes place in us when, through contraction and elongation of our muscles, we perceive whether we are walking or standing still, jumping or dancing. We perceive whether or how we are in motion through this sense of movement. When it is radiated into the soul, this sense results in that feeling of freedom which allows man to sense himself as soul, namely, the experience of one's own free soul element. The fact that you experience yourself as a free soul is due to the effects of the sense of movement. It is due to what streams into your soul from the muscular contractions and elongations, just as inner comfort or discomfort is brought about by the results, the experiences of the life sense flowing into your soul realm.

When the sense of balance streams into the soul, the soul element is already considerably detached. Unless we have just fainted and are completely unconscious, just think how little we actually become aware of how we are placed into the world in a condition of equilibrium. How then do we sense the experiences of the sense of balance which radiate into the soul? That is entirely a soul experience. We feel it as inner tranquility, that inner tranquility which brings it about that when I go from one place to another I do not leave behind the being contained within my body but take it along; it remains, quietly, the same. Thus, I could fly through the air and yet quietly remain the same person. This is what makes us appear to be independent of time. I do not leave myself behind today, I am the same tomorrow. This sense of being independent of the corporeality is the inpouring of the sense of balance into the soul. It is the sensation of experiencing oneself as spirit.

Still less do we perceive the inner processes of the sense of touch which, in fact, we project entirely to the outside. We can sense whether bodies are hard or soft, rough or smooth, made of silk or wool. We project the experiences of touch entirely into external space. What we have in the sense of touch is actually an inner experience, but what takes place within remains completely in the subconscious. Only a shadow of it is present in the properties of the sense of touch ascribed to the objects. The organ of the sense of touch, however, causes us to feel whether the things are silken or woolen, hard or soft, rough or smooth. This, too, sends it effects within. It radiates into the soul, but the human being is not aware of the connection of his soul experiences with what the sense of touch attains in touching, because the two aspects are greatly differentiated—namely, what streams to the soul within and what is experienced on the surface outside. What does, however, stream into the soul is nothing else but being permeated with the feeling of God. Without the sense of touch, man would have no feeling for God. What is felt by the sense of touch as roughness and smoothness, hardness and softness, is the element streaming outward. What is turned back as a soul phenomenon is the condition of permeation with universal cosmic substance, with being as such. It is precisely through the sense of touch that we ascertain the existence of the outer world. When we see something, we do not immediately believe that it is indeed present in space; we are convinced of its spatial existence when the sense of touch can grasp it. What permeates all things and penetrates into us also, what holds and bears all of you—this all-pervading substance of God—enters consciousness and is the inwardly reflected experience of the sense of touch.

You are familiar with the outward radiation of the sense of smell. When the sense of smell radiates its experiences towards man's inner being, however, he no longer takes note of how these inner experiences coincide with the external ones. When a person smells something, it is the extension of his sense of smell to the outside; he projects the images to the external realm. This effect is also projected within; man, however, is aware of it less frequently than of the outward effect. Many people like to smell fragrant things and experience the outward emanation of the sense of smell. There are also people who surrender themselves to what grips the inner being as the effect of the sense of smell so intensely that it not only pervades the human being like the feeling of God, but places itself in him in such a manner that he experiences it as the mystic oneness with God.

5. sense of smell = mystical union with God
4. sense of touch = permeation by the feeling of God
3. sense of balance = inner rest, feeling oneself as spirit
2. sense of movement = experience of one's own free soul nature
1. sense of life = feeling of well-being

Thus you see that if we penetrate to the heart of things as they really are in the world, we must free ourselves from a great deal of sentimental prejudice. Some aspiring mystics will certainly have a funny feeling when they hear what this mystical experience actually represents in relation to the sense world, for it is the experience of the sense of smell sending its effects into the soul's inner being.

There is no need to be alarmed by these things, for we shape all our sensations according to the external, conventional world of semblance, of Maya. And why should one cling to this Maya-conception of the sense of smell, even though the sense of smell is not, to begin with, considered to be a part of the most sublime aspects? Why shouldn't we be able to consider the loftiest aspect of this sense of smell where it becomes the creator of man's inner experiences? Mystics in fact are often inveterate materialists. They condemn matter and wish to ascend above it because it is so lowly. So they raise themselves above it by pleasurably surrendering to the effects of the sense of smell within.

When confirmed mystics of the sensitive kind, such as Mechthild von Magdeburg, Saint Theresa or Saint John of the Cross, describe their inner experiences—and such individuals give quite vivid descriptions—one who possesses a great sensitivity and susceptibility for such matters will “smell” or sense what is going on because of the particular nature of these experiences. The mysticism, even of Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler,¹⁷ can be “smelled”—indeed, more adequately—as it can be absorbed sensually through the soul's experience. A person who perceives matters in an occult sense will sense a sweetish aroma within when he considers the descriptions of the mystic experiences, for instance, of Saint Theresa or Mechthild of Magdeburg. When he considers the mysticism of Tauler or Meister Eckhart, he experiences a scent reminiscent of rue, a herb with a tart, but not unpleasant, odor.

In short, the particular and striking thing we discover is that when we move outward through our senses we come into a higher world, an objective spiritual world. When we descend through mysticism, through permeation by the feeling of God, through the inner tranquility of experiencing oneself as spirit, through feeling oneself free in soul, and through inner comfort, then we come to corporeality, to material substance. I have already indicated this to you in these considerations. In terms of Maya, we attain to ever more lowly regions in our inner experience than those we already have in ordinary life. In lifting ourselves outward beyond the senses, we enter into higher regions. This can indeed show you how important it is not to harbor illusions concerning these matters. Above all, we should not delude ourselves into believing that we penetrate into a special kind of spirituality when we descend into our inner being through the mystical sense of union with the divine. No, there we merely descend into what our nose gives us within; and the most beloved mystics offer us something in their descriptions of what they felt within themselves through the sense of smell continuing its effects inwardly.

You can see that when one speaks from beyond the threshold, speaking out of the spiritual world about the affairs of this world, one must speak in words that differ completely from the conceptions about the physical world formed by people from this side. This really should not surprise you, for you ought not to expect the spiritual world beyond the threshold to be a mere duplication of the physical world. Such duplications are experienced in only one instance, namely, when you read the descriptions of the higher worlds given in Islamic esotericism, or those of the Devachan by Mr. Leadbeater,¹⁸ There, with very few changes, you basically come across duplications of this world. People find this very comforting, especially among those who enjoy a certain elegant life style with fine clothes and sufficient satisfaction of their appetites here an the physical plane. One frequently notes that they expect to enter after death into a life style in Devachan that is not unlike the one here, as Mr. Leadbeater does indeed describe it to them. One who has to outline the truths concerning the spiritual worlds is not in this comfortable position. He has to tell you that permeation with the feeling of God leads to the inward projection of smell, and that the mystic actually reveals nothing more to the genuine occultist than the manner in which he smells within. There is no room for sentimentality in an actual observation of the world from the spiritual standpoint. I have mentioned it many times. If one really penetrates into the spiritual world, matters become serious to such a degree that even small things must be given different words from those applied to them here, and that words themselves acquire a completely opposite meaning. To penetrate into the spiritual world does not merely mean describing specters of this physical world. Instead, we have to brace ourselves, for much of what is experienced there is the opposite of the physical world here; above all, it is the reverse of what is pleasant.

I wished to place this viewpoint before you today in order to convey to you a more general feeling for what is really required for our age. When one listens to what is being said today in the West (it is somewhat different the farther east one goes), when a thought is interpreted in a Western manner, one frequently hears the following: One cannot express oneself this way in French; one cannot say that in English. The farther West one goes, the more prevalent is this opinion. But what does this opinion imply other than an attachment to the physical, the condition of having already become rigid in the physical as opposed to the real world? Of what consequence are words? What matters is that people go beyond words and arrive at a mutual understanding. Then, however, one must be capable of freeing the words from objects, but not only this, one must even be able to free the subjective feelings acquired in the sense world. If the sense of smell is looked upon as a lowly sense, this is a value judgment arrived at in the sensory world. Likewise, if the inner correlate of it, namely mysticism, is regarded as something nobler, this is also an opinion gained in the sense world. Considered from yonder side of the threshold, the organization of the sense of smell is of extraordinary significance, whereas mysticism, beheld from beyond the threshold, is nothing so sublime. This is because mysticism is in fact a product of the material, physical world, for it represents the manner in which human beings who actually remain materialistic try to penetrate into the spiritual world. They regard everything existing here on the physical plane as nothing but matter. It is all too lowly, too materialistic for them. If they were to penetrate into what does in fact exist outside, they would come directly into the spiritual world, into the realm of the hierarchies. Instead, they sink into their inner being, fumbling about in the pure matter within their own skin. It is true that this appears to them as the higher spirit. But it is not a question of our penetrating mystically into our Body through our soul-spiritual phenomena; rather, it is a matter of penetrating through our material phenomena, the phenomena of the sense world, to the spiritual world, entering the world of the hierarchies, the world of spiritual entities. We shall never arrive at impulses that lead again to an ascent until humanity will accept opinions such as these and permit one to speak in different terms about the world than those of the last four hundred years. Nothing will be gained until our social views are also formulated out of such completely transformed concepts. If we wish to remain in what we have acquired so far, basing our social activity only on that, we shall slide deeper and deeper into decline, into the decline of the Western world.

On what is something like Oswald Spengler's¹⁹ judgment based? It rests on the fact that although he has a brilliant mind, he can think only in terms of the ordinary concepts of the Western world prevalent today. These he analyses and thus figures out—and quite correctly in terms of these concepts—that by the beginning of the third millennium barbarism will have taken the place of our civilization. If one speaks to him of anthroposophy, he turns red in the face, for he cannot stand it. Were he to comprehend what can enter into men through anthroposophy and how it can invigorate them, then he would see that the decline can be prevented only through anthroposophy, that it is the one and only way to come to an ascent again.

• 15. Rudolf Steiner: Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit, GA 115 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1971); Human and Cosmic Thought, Human and Cosmic Thought, GA 151 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1967); Kosmische und menschliche Geschichte, Vol. I and II, GA 170/171 (Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1964). Not translated.
• 16. Rudolf Steiner: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, GA 10 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 17. Mechthild von Magdeburg: 1207–1290, mystic; St. Theresa, 1515–1582, Spanish saint; Johannes vom Kreuz (Juan de la Cruz): 1542–1591, mystic and theologian, reformer of the Carmelite Order; Meister Eckhart: 1260–1327, Dominican mystic; Johannes Tauler: 1300–1361, student of Meister Eckhart, mystic, Dominican preacher.
• 18. Charles Webster Leadbeater: 1847–1934, prominent personality of the Theosophical Society.
• 19. Oswald Spengler: 1880–1936, The Decline of the West, Munich, 1922.

By linking much of what has been said lately with various outside information, you will have gathered one thing, namely, that our anthroposophical movement has entered a state that expects of each individual seeking to participate in it that he associate this participation with a profound sense of responsibility. I have repeatedly alluded to this but it is not always envisaged thoroughly enough. Just because we are placed within our movement, we must not lose sight of the terribly grave time presently faced by European civilization and its American cousins. Even if we ourselves would say nothing about the connection between the impulses generated by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and contemporary historical events—although it is certainly necessary to speak up—such events would make an impact on our activities and inevitably would play a part in them without our having a hand in the matter. Therefore, the point is not to shut our eyes to the importance of what is indicated by such words.

From the interpretations put forward by Dr. Boos²⁰ yesterday, a number of friends who had not realized it before may have understood the necessary and practical connection existing between the idea of the threefold social order and the aims of anthroposophy.

The course of world events presently resembles that of an unusually complicated organism, and from all the various phenomena that must be carefully observed, the direction being taken by this organism becomes obvious. Much is happening today that initially makes an insignificant appearance. These seemingly unimportant events, however, frequently point to something immensely incisive and drastic. Again, things go on that clearly show the extraordinary difficulty we have in freeing ourselves from old familiar ideas in order to rise to a perception of what is in keeping with the times.

You can see from a number of newspaper reports of the last few days²¹ the effect made on the world by what issues forth from Dornach, how certain aspects of it are received by a number of persons. We should give these matters serious consideration, recognizing that every word we utter today must be well thought out. We should not say important things without assuming the obligation to inform ourselves about the course of world affairs in what is currently a most complicated organism. At the earliest opportunity I shall have to go into additional matters that have a bearing here; today I only wish to introduce the subject by saying that because of the connections of our movement with general world affairs it is above all else our duty to acquire a full understanding of the fact that we can no longer indulge in any sectarianism whatever in our movement. I have often mentioned this. The present time makes it necessary for us to rely on each individual co-worker, but each one bearing the full responsibility for what he represents in reference to our movement. This responsibility should take the form of an obligation never to say anything that does not appear through inner reasons to have the right relationship to the general course of contemporary world events. Sectarian activities are least of all in harmony with present-day world events. What is to be advocated today must be of a nature that can be represented before the whole world. It must be free in word and deed of any sectarian or dilettante character. We should never allow fear to deter us from sailing between Scylla and Charybdis.

Indicating a certain Scylla, many people may certainly say: How am I supposed to inform myself about what happens today when the course of events has become so complex, when it is so difficult to deduce the inner trends of facts from the symptoms? However, this should not lead to the Charybdis of doing nothing; it should induce us to steer the correct course, namely, to make us aware of our obligation to be in harmony with world events as far as possible, using all available means. It is certainly easier to say: This is anthroposophy and I am studying it; based on it, I engage in a little thinking, researching one or the other subject which I then represent before the world. If we wish to be active in the way indicated above without looking left or right, wearing blinkers in a sense in face of the great, important events of the present, we head straight for sectarianism. We are duty bound to study the contemporary course of events and, above all, to base our observations on the judgment we can acquire through the facts engendered by spiritual science itself.

Throughout the years, facts have been gathered together here for the purpose of enabling each individual person to form a judgment on the basis of these facts. They must not be left out of consideration when, based on our observations, a person wishes to give an opinion about something that is happening today. I mean to refer to this only in general terms, but plan to discuss it in greater detail at the first opportunity.

Today I should like to present something that will supplement what I said last Sunday about the nature of the human sense organism.²² I shall begin by pointing out a certain contradiction that I have often dwelt on before. On the one hand, without the general public knowing much about it, but nevertheless thinking along these lines, there exists the condition today of being infected in a sense with the natural scientific mode of thinking. On the other hand, we have one type of person still holding to the old traditional belief regarding moral or religious ideals; another has only skepticism and doubt, while for a third it is a matter of indifference. This great contradiction basically stirs and vibrates through all humanity today: How is the inevitable course of natural events related to the validity of ethical, moral and religious ideals?

I now wish to repeat what many of you may have already heard me say.²³ On the one side, we have the natural scientific world concept. It supposes that by means of its facts it can determine something about the course of the universe, in particular, that of the earth. And although it may consider its assertions to be hypothetical, they are imprinted into humanity's whole thinking, attitude and feeling. Our earthly existence is traced back to a kind of nebular condition. It is thought that everything arising out of this nebula is brought about entirely through the compulsion of natural laws. Again, the final condition of our earth's existence is also viewed as being based upon inflexible imperative laws, and concepts are formed about how the earth will meet destruction. Scientists base this kind of view on a widely accepted fundamental concept—even taught to school children—that the substance of the entire universe is indestructible, regardless of whether it is pictured as consisting of atoms, ions or the like. It is thought that at the beginning of earth's formation this substance was in some way compressed, then changed and metamorphosed, but that fundamentally the same substance is present today that existed at the beginning of earth evolution and that it will be present at the end, although compressed in a different form. It is supposed that this substance is indestructible, that everything consists only of transformations of this substance. The concept of the so called conservation of energy was added to this by assuming that in the beginning there were a number of forces which are then pictured as undergoing changes. Basically, the same sum of forces is again imagined to exist in the final condition of earth.

There have been only a few brave spirits who have rebelled against ideas of this kind. One of these I have often mentioned as a typical example, namely, Herman Grimm,²⁴ who has said: People talk of a nebulous state, of the nebulous essence of Kant-Laplace, at the beginning of the earth's or the world's existence. From it, it is supposed that everything on the earth, including the human being, has been compressed through purely natural processes. Furthermore, it is assumed that this undergoes changes until it finally falls back into the sun as a cinder. Now, Herman Grimm is of the opinion that a hungry dog nosing around the bone of a carcass presents a more attractive picture than this theory of Kant-Laplace concerning world existence, and that from a cultural and historical point of view people of the future will find it difficult to grasp how it had been possible for the nineteenth and twentieth century to have fallen victim to such pathological thinking. As I said, a few courageous individuals have opposed these ideas. The latter are so widespread today, however, that when somebody like Herman Grimm rejects them, it is said of him: Well, an art historian need not understand anything about natural science. When someone who claims that he is knowledgeable about natural science raises objections, he is regarded as a fool. These ideas are taken today as self-evident and the significance of this attitude is sensed by very few people. For, if this conception has even the slightest justification, all talk of moral and religious ideals is meaningless, for according to this conception these ideals are simply the product of human brains and rise up like bubbles. The social-democratic theorists label these ideals an ideology which has arisen through the transformations of substance, and which will vanish when our earth comes to an end. All our moral and religious concepts are then simply delusions. For the reality postulated by the natural scientific world-view is of a kind that leaves no room for a moral or religious outlook, if this scientific view of life is accepted in the way it is interpreted by the majority of people today. The point is, therefore, that, on the one hand, the time is ripe and, on the other, urgently requires that a world conception be drawn from quite different sources than those of today's education.

The only sources that make it possible for a moral and religious world concept to exist side by side with the natural scientific one are those of spiritual science. But they must be sought where they find expression in full earnestness. It is difficult for many people nowadays to seek out these sources. They prefer to ignore the glaring contradiction that I have once again brought to your notice, for they do not have the courage to assail the natural scientific world-view itself. They hear from those they look upon as authorities that the law of the conservation of matter and of energy²⁵ is irrefutable, and that anyone who questions it is a mere dilettante. Oppressed by the tremendous weight of this false authority, mankind lacks the courage to turn from it to the sources of spiritual science.

External facts also demonstrate that the well-being of Christianity, a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, depends upon our turning to the sources of spiritual science. The external course of events does indeed show this. Look at the so-called progressive theologians and what is expounded by the more advanced representatives of Christianity. Materialism has, after all, fastened its hold even upon religion. One can no longer understand how the spiritual, divine principle that is indicated by the name, Christ, is united with the human personality of Jesus of Nazareth. For, today, it is only through the sources of spiritual science that insight concerning this union can be acquired.

Thus, matters have reached the point where even theology has grown materialistic and speaks only of “the humble man from Nazareth,” of a man who is reputed to have taught something more sublime than others, but in the end is only to be considered as a great teacher. One of the most eminent among present-day theologians, Adolf Harnack,²⁶ actually coined the words: “It is the Father, not the Christ, Who belongs in the Gospel.” In other words, the Gospel is not supposed to speak of Christ, because theologians such as Harnack are no longer familiar with the Christ; they know only the teacher from Nazareth. They are still willing to accept his teaching. The teachings concerning the Father, the Creator of the world, belong in the Gospel, but not a teaching about Christ Jesus himself!

Without doubt, Christianity would continue on this path of naturalization, of materialization, if a spiritual-scientific impulse were not forthcoming for it. In all honesty, no conception concerning the union of the divine and the human natures in Christ Jesus can be derived by humanity from what has been handed down to it by tradition. For that we require the uncovering of new sources of spiritual science. We need this for the religious life and also for giving the social conditions of our civilization the new structure demanded by current events. Above all, we need a complete reconstruction of science, a permeation of all scientific fields with what flows from the spiritual-scientific sources. Without this, we cannot progress. Those who think that it is unnecessary to be concerned with the course of the religious or the social life, the course of public events throughout the civilized world or the accomplishments of science; those who believe they can present anthroposophy in sectarian seclusion to a haphazardly thrown together group that is looked upon as a circle of strangers by the rest of the world, are definitely victims of a grievous delusion.

The sense of responsibility in face of the whole trend of present events underlies everything that I say here. It is the basis of every sentence, of every word. I have to mention this because it is not always understood with all seriousness. If people today continue referring to mysticism in the same manner as was done by many during the course of the nineteenth century, it is no longer in harmony with what the world currently demands. If the content of anthroposophical teaching is merely added to what otherwise takes place in the course of world events, this is also not in harmony with present-day requirements. Remember how the problem, the riddle of human freedom has been the central theme of the studies I have conducted for decades. This enigma of human freedom must be placed by us today in the center of each and every true spiritual-scientific consideration.

This must be done for two reasons. First, because all that has come down to us from the old Mysteries, all that has been presented to the world by the initiation knowledge of old is lacking in any real comprehension of the riddle of human freedom. Sublime and mighty were the traditions those mystery teachers could pass on to posterity. There is greatness and power in the mythological traditions of the various peoples that can indeed be interpreted esoterically, although not in the way it is usually done. Something grand is contained in the other traditions that have as their source the initiation science of ancient times, if only the latter is correctly understood. One aspect is lacking, however; there is no reference at all to the riddle of human freedom in the initiation science of the ancient Mysteries, in the myths of the various peoples—even when they are comprehended esoterically—or in the traditions deriving from this initiation science. For, whoever proceeds from a present-day initiation knowledge, from an initiation of today, knows how present initiation compares to that of the past. He knows that in the course of its worldwide evolution mankind is only now entering the stage of real freedom, and that formerly it was simply not necessary to give to human beings an initiation science impregnated completely with the riddle of freedom. Today, hardly anybody has an inkling of what this riddle of freedom includes, what condition the human soul finds itself in when it becomes clearly aware of the burden it shoulders due to this enigma. New light must be shed, after all, on all initiation knowledge due to this riddle of human freedom. We observe how certain secret societies carry on in direct continuation from former times, some of them being quite strongly involved in present-day life. They only preserve the traditions of the past, however, only imitating and continuing on in the sense of the old practices. These societies are nothing more than mere shadows of the past; indeed, they represent something that can only do harm to mankind if it is active nowadays.

We have to realize that if anyone today were to teach even the loftiest former mysteries, they would be detrimental to humanity. No one who understands the nature of present initiation can possibly teach in a timely sense applicable to our age what was once taught in the Egyptian, Chaldean, the Indian or even those still so near our time, the Greek mysteries. After all, what has been propagated up to now as doctrine concerning Christianity has all been produced by these traditional teachings. What is needed is that we comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha anew based on a new teaching. This is what must be considered on the one side.

On the other side, we see the course of world events. We see how the striving for the impulse of freedom rises up from subconscious depths of the human soul; how, at the present time, this call for freedom resounds through all human efforts. It does indeed pervade them, but there is so much that resounds in human striving that is not clearly understood, that only echoes up from subconscious levels yet to be permeated by clear comprehension. One might say that mankind thirsts for freedom! Initiation science realizes that it must produce an initiation knowledge that is illuminated by the light of freedom.

And these two, this striving of humanity and the creation of a new initiation wisdom, illuminated by the light of freedom, must come together. They must meet in all areas. Therefore, a discussion of the social question must not be based on all sorts of old premises. We can only speak of it when we view it in the light of spiritual science, and that is what people find so difficult. Why is that?

Mankind is indeed striving for freedom, freedom for the individual, and rightfully so. I emphasize: rightfully so. It is no longer possible for human beings to cooperate with group souls in the sense of the ancient group system. They have to develop into individualities. This striving, however, seems to be at variance with what is acquired by listening to initiation science, something that must obviously originate from individual persons in the first place. The ancient initiate had his own ways and means of seeking out his pupils and passing on to them the initiation wisdom, even of gaining recognition for them, himself and his Mystery center. The modern initiate cannot allow that, for it would necessitate working with certain forces and impulses of the group soul nature, something that is not permissible today. Thus, humanity's condition today is one where everyone, proceeding from whatever his standpoint happens to be, wishes to become an individuality. For that reason, he naturally does not care to listen to what comes from a human being as initiation science. Yet, no progress can be made until it is understood that men can become individualities only when, in turn, they accept the content of initiation science from other individualities. This is not only related to isolated ideological questions. It is connected with the basic nature of our whole age and its effects on the cultural, political and economic spheres. Humanity is yearning for freedom, and initiation science would like to speak of this freedom. We have, however, only just reached the point in the stage of mankind's evolution where sound human reasoning can grasp the idea of freedom. Today, we must gain insight into much that can be gathered from anthroposophical literature, and that I should like to summarize in turn from a number of viewpoints. It must be understood today what sort of being man is. All the abstract chatter concerning monism misses the point of true monism which can only be attained after one has gone through much else, but it cannot be proclaimed from the first as a world conception.

Man is a twofold being. On the one side, we have what may be called man's lower nature—the word leads to misunderstandings, but there are few words in our language that adequately express what one would like to convey from the spiritual-scientific standpoint—namely, the physical, corporeal organization of which he consists in the first place. I have described the latter to you in my last lecture in connection with the sense organization. Today, we shall not go into that but refer to it again tomorrow. Those of you, however, who have studied anthroposophical literature to any extent at all, have some idea of man's physical, bodily organization and know that it is connected to the surrounding environment. What constitutes the outside world and dwells out there in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, also constitutes us human beings in the physical, corporeal sense. In a way we are its concentration, elevated to a higher level, and figuratively one could say that we are the crown of creation. In the physical, bodily sense we are a confluence of the effects of forces and substances occurring outside and appearing before us through our sense perceptions.

On the other side, we have our inner life. We have our will, our feeling, our thinking and our conceptual capability. When we reflect upon ourselves, we can observe our own will, feeling and thinking, and permeate these with what we call our religious, moral and other ideals. Here, we arrive at what may be termed the man of soul and spirit. Again, this term may easily lead to misunderstandings, but it must be used. We cannot manage if we do not turn the gaze of our soul on one hand to this soul-spiritual human being, and on the other to the physical, corporeal man. But whether we study the facts of nature impartially or contemplate spiritual science, it is necessary to come to the realization: This physical, bodily organization is not really available to what human science, currently existing in the exoteric world, is able to grasp in any sense. If I am to clarify this schematically by means of a sketch, I should like to say: When I condense all that constitutes the human physical organization and its connection with the whole surrounding world (red in sketch), this continues to a certain point. I shall indicate that here by a line. Despite all modern amateurish objections of psychology, beyond this point and polarically differing from it, we have what may be called the soul-spiritual nature of man (yellow), that, in turn, is linked with a world of soul and spirit. That world appears most abstract to present-day human beings, because they grasp it only in the sense of abstract moral or religious ideals that have also become increasingly abstract conceptions. Yet, in regard to both sides of human nature, we are obliged to say: What is looked upon today as science encompasses neither man's physical body nor his soul-spiritual nature. We cannot recognize the physical corporeal nature of man. You can discover the reasons for this in my little book, Philosophy and Anthroposophy.²⁷ For, if man would penetrate into himself with inner vision, that is, if he were to look into the very depths of his being and perceive what is going on there, he would be able to do so exactly in the sense of what modern science deems "exact." Then, however, man could not be the being he is today, for he would have no memory, no facility of recollection. When we look at the world, we retain its pictures in our memory. This means that impressions of the world reach only as far as this barrier (see arrow in sketch). From there, they strike back into the soul and we remember them. What thus strikes back out of our own selves into memory conceals from us our physical bodily nature. We cannot look into it, for if we were able to do so all the impressions would merely be momentary, nothing would be thrown back to form recollections. It is only because this barrier acts as a reflector—after all, we cannot look behind a mirror either, its impressions are reflected back to us—that we cannot see inside ourselves. The impressions are reflected back to us unless we rise to spiritual science. If they were not thrown back, we would not have the reflected impressions of memory in ordinary life. We must be so organized as human beings in life that we have memories. Due to this, however, our physical bodily organization is concealed from us. Just as we cannot see through a mirror to what lies behind it, we cannot look behind or under the mirror of memory and behold the way the physical body of the human being is organized.

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This is true psychology; this is the true nature of memory. Only when spiritual-scientific methods penetrate through this reflector in such a way that no use is made of the faculty of memory—as I have already mentioned in public lectures—and, instead, without recollection, one works each time with new impressions, only then are the true forms of body and soul discovered.

It is the same in the other direction. If, with our ordinary powers of cognition, we could penetrate the soul-spiritual concerning which I told you last Sunday that this is what is in truth located behind the world of the senses rather than atoms and molecules—and if we were not prevented, so to speak, by the boundaries and barriers of natural science, there would not be present in us something that is, in turn, needed in human life and must be developed by us between birth and death, namely, the capacity for love. The human capacity for love is created in us by the fact that, in this life between birth and death, if we do not advance to spiritual science, we have to forego penetrating the veil of the senses and seeing into the spiritual world. We retain the capacity of memory only by renouncing all ability to see into our own physical body. Thereby, however, we are exposed to two great illusions. The dogmatic adherents of the natural scientific world conception are at the mercy of one of these illusions. They pay no attention to initiation knowledge and do not come to the realization—in the way I described it to you last Sunday²⁸—that behind the veil of the senses there is no matter, no substance, no energy, of which natural science speaks, but soul-spiritual being through and through. Today, I must still reiterate with the same emphasis what I stressed in my commentary on the third volume of Goethe's scientific writings, namely, Goethe's Theory of Color.²⁹ Out there is the world's carpet of colors, the red, blue and green; out there are the other perceptions. No atoms and molecules are concealed behind it all, but spiritual beings. What is driven to the surface from these spiritual beings lives and expresses itself in the world's carpet of colors, in its relationships of sound and warmth and all the other sensations the world transmits to us.

Those, however, who are dogmatic followers of the natural scientific world view today do not realize this. They have no desire to listen to initiation science. In consequence, they begin to speculate about what is hidden behind color, warmth, and so forth, and arrive at a material construction of the world. However well founded this construction may seem for example, the modern theory of ions—it is always the result of speculation. We must not speculate about what is behind the world of the senses; we may only gain experiences there by means of a higher spiritual world. Otherwise, we must content ourselves to remain within the phenomena. The sense world is a sum of phenomena and must be comprehended as such.

Thus, we are given a picture of nature today which is then extended to include the state of the earth at its beginning and at its end—a picture that excludes an ethical and religious world view for the honest thinker.

The victims of the second illusion are those who Look within. For the most part, they do not go beyond what is reflected. Ordinary man in everyday life perceives the effects of memory—he recalls what he experienced yesterday and the day before, indeed, years ago. Someone who becomes a mystic today brings any number of things to the surface from within which he then clothes in beautiful mystical words and theories. But as I have recently pointed out,³⁰ these things are but the bubbling and seething of his inner organic life. For, if we penetrate this mirror, we do not come to what a Master Eckhart or Johannes Tauler have in their mysticism. We arrive at organic processes of which, it is true, the world today has scarcely any idea. What is clothed in such beautiful words is related to these organic processes as the flame of a candle is related to the flammable material—it is the product of these organic processes. The mysticism of a John of the Cross, of a Mechthild of Magdeburg, or of Johannes Tauler and Master Eckhart³¹ is beautiful, but nevertheless, it is only what boils up out of the organic life and is described in abstract forms merely because one lacks the insight into how this organic life is active. He can be no true spiritual scientist who interprets as mysticism the inwardly surging organic life. Certainly, beautiful words are used to describe it, but we must be capable of taking a completely different viewpoint from that of the ordinary world when referring to these matters. We ought not to adopt the humanly arrogant standpoint and say: The inner organic life is the lower form of life. It is not elevated if its effects are designated as mysticism. On the contrary, we are impelled into the life of the spirit when we discern this organic life and its effects and realize that the more we descend into man's individual nature, the more we distance ourselves from the spiritual. We do not approach it more closely. We draw near the spirit only by way of spiritual science, not by descending into ourselves. When we do the latter, it is our task to discover how the collaboration of heart, liver and kidneys produces mysticism; for that is what it does.

I have often pointed out that the tragedy of modern materialism is that it actually cannot perceive the material effects, indeed, that it cannot even reach as far as the material effects. Today we have neither a true natural science nor a genuine psychology. True natural science leads to the spirit, and the kind of psychology progressing in the direction that we have in mind today leads to insight into heart, liver and kidneys, not the abstractions our modern, amateurish psychology speaks of. For what is frequently called thinking, feeling and willing today is an abstract set of words. People lack insight into the concrete aspects, and it is easy to accuse even sincere spiritual science of materialism just because it leads into the nature of material elements in order to guide us in this way to the spirit.

It will be the specific task of true spiritualism to unveil the nature of all matter. Then it will be able to show how spirit is effective in matter. It must be taken quite seriously that spiritual science ought not to be concerned with the mere logicality of knowledge, but has to aim for a knowledge that is action. Something must be done—with regard to knowing. What is taking place in the process of cognizing must become involved in the course of world events. It must be something factual. It was just this that I was trying to indicate last Sunday and the days before. It is a matter of arriving at the realization that spirit as such must be comprehended as a fact; no theory concerning the spirit may be developed. Theories should only serve to lead to living experience of the spirit. This is the reason why it is so often necessary for the true spiritual scientist to speak paradoxically. We cannot persist today in talking in the customary formulations when we speak about spiritual science; otherwise, we come to what an erroneous theosophy has led to. It mentions any number of the members of man's being—the physical man, the etheric and astral being—each one more tenuous than the last. Physical man is dense, the etheric is less so, the astral being is still more rarefied. There are utterly tenuous mental and other states that are increasingly delicate, a perceptible mist, but all remain a mist, they all remain matter! That, however, is not the point. What does matter is that one learns in substance itself to overcome material. This is why one must frequently employ words that have a different connotation from the one customary in everyday life.

Therefore, we must say—and that matter will become clearer to us tomorrow: Take, on the one side, a person who is of a thoroughly materialistic mind and has been led astray, shall we say, by present-day materialism, one who cannot raise himself to a view of anything spiritual and, according to theory, is a complete materialist, considering any mention of the spirit pure nonsense. Suppose, however, that what he says concerning matter is intelligent and really to the point. This man, then, would have spirit. Although, by means of his spirit, he might uphold materialism, he would have spirit.

Then, let us look at another person who is a member of a theosophical society and adheres to the viewpoint: This is the physical body, then comes the more rarefied etheric body, followed by a more tenuous astral body, mental body, and so on. It does not take much spirit to make these assertions. Indeed, such a theory can be represented with very little spirit. The expounding of such a spiritual world is then, strictly speaking, a falsehood, because in reality one only pictures a material world phrased in spiritual terms.

Where would a person look who is genuinely seeking for the spirit? Will he seek it by turning to the materialistic theorist who has spirit, albeit in a logical manner, or will he turn to the one who makes plausible statements, so to say, but whose words refer only to matter? The true spiritualist will speak of the spirit in connection with the former, the one who represents a materialistic world conception, for there spirit can be present, whereas no spirit need be present in expounding a spiritual view. What is important is that spirit is at work, not that one speaks of spirit.

I wished to say this today merely to clear up certain matters that seem paradoxical. The spirited materialist may be more filled with spirit than the exponent of a spiritual theory who presents it spiritlessly. In the case of true spiritual science, the possibility no longer exists merely to dispute logically about ideological standpoints. It becomes imperative to grasp the spirit in its actuality. That is impossible unless one first comprehends some preliminary concepts such as those of which we have spoken today and shall be considering further tomorrow.

• 20. Dr. Roman Boos's descriptions, given on August 13, 1920, were not recorded. He reported orally on them to Dr. Steiner.
• 21. Refers to a news report carried by the French, German and Swiss press, according to which the German Foreign Minister, Simons, had supposedly told a reporter of the “Impartial” that he was a follower of the reforms suggested by Rudolf Steiner (the threefold social organism). See, among others, “Basler Nachrichte,” 1920, #345, August 14, in which an article is quoted from the “Vossische Zeitung” of August 6. In the lecture of April 22, 1921, in answer to a particularly crude article in which Simons was described as “the favorite disciple of the Theosophist, Steiner,” Rudolf Steiner made the following comment: “In the weekly magazine which is primarily the mouthpiece of widespread public opinion, we note in the last issue that public sentiment was being worked up against Simons' policies. It goes without saying that neither anthroposophical spiritual science nor the threefold movement have anything to do with Simons' politics. It is out of a spirit of deep untruthfulness that anthroposphical spiritual science is lumped together with Simons' policies.”
• 22. See Lecture III of this volume.
• 23. See the lecture of March 18, 1920; printed in “Menschenschule,” Pamphlet 6, 1958.
• 24. Hermann Grimm: 1828–1901, Goethe-Vorlesungen, Vol. 2, Berlin, 1877.
• 25. This law was first proclaimed by Julius Robert Mayer (1814–1878), doctor and scientist. See Rudolf Steiner: Erdensterben und Weltenleben, GA 181, Lecture XII (not included in English translation of this cycle). Dornach, 1967.
• 26. Adolf von Harnack: 1851–1930. The quotation literally says: “Not the Son, but only the Father belongs in the Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it.” In Das Wesen des Christentums, Leipzig, 1900.
• 27. Rudolf Steiner: “Durch den Geist zur Wirklichkeits-Erkenntnis der Menschenraetsel: Philosophie und Anthroposophie. Vier Maerchen (aus den Mysteriendramen). Anthroposophischer Seelenkalender. Der Seelen Erwachen, 7.u. 8. Bild,” Berlin, 1918. Compiled upon requests by friends and published in book-form for the German soldiers on the front.
• 28. See Lecture III of this volume.
• 29. See Note #4
• 30. See Lecture II of this volume.
• 31. See Note #17

Today, I would like to develop a number of themes, repeatedly presented as far as some of you are concerned. At the same time, this can serve as a preparation for what will have to be put forth tomorrow³² concerning the formation of a social opinion. First of all, I would like to call your attention to the manner in which we proceed within the sphere of present-day academic habits when debating and forming opinions concerning ideological questions. Our main concern is to decide logically: What is true and what is false? This specific mode of inquiry is something that must change today. Johann Gottlieb Fichte³³ put it beautifully, “One's philosophy depends on what sort of person one is.” Depending on a person's disposition, he forms a more materialistic or a more spiritualistic world conception, a realistic, idealistic, liberal or conservative, socialistic political world outlook; he develops a philistine or a progressive opinion concerning the emancipation of women. I could add indefinitely to the list. Opinions are formed and defended, because a person is convinced he possesses the only right view and that someone with an opposing idea is wrong. Right and wrong is something that is of special interest to us today in forming a judgment.

Already, it can be observed—as we shall make clear presently—that we have the beginning of a transition from these “true and false” judgments to something entirely different. First, however, we shall try to clarify that the concepts of “true” and “false” did not always mean what they do today. Even as late as in the early days of Christianity, but particularly in ancient Egyptian and Chaldean times, not to mention the periods that preceded these cultural epochs, something quite different was applicable when one wished to form a judgment. Logic was not the determining factor. Instead, one had the feeling that if a person judged something in a certain way, it was healthy, if he formed an opinion in another way it was unhealthy. Just as we judge a person to be healthy because he is chubby-faced, rosy and lively, and we judge someone to be sickly because he is emaciated, pale and has circles under the eyes, it was said that an individual was healthy or sick depending on the way he made judgments. In the manner in which he formed opinions one saw an expression of the whole human organization just as we do in the chubby-faced or drawn, pale appearance. A person was judged more on what he himself actually was, less in regard to what he represented concerning his surroundings about which he developed for himself conceptions of right or wrong.

I have already emphasized for a number of you who were present earlier that in a certain sense we must return again to this way of looking at things. The course of human evolution is such that certain instinctive atavistic truths, originating from the ancient Mysteries, gradually became intellectualized and abstract. To this day we live in this intellectualism and abstraction. The new initiation science, on the other hand, which must become established, has to revert in a certain sense to the former feelings in full consciousness. Hence, in the future—although in a more or less distant future in regard to general humanity—there will be no dispute concerning whether an opinion is right or wrong, if one is seriously endeavoring to work for the progress of human civilization. An individual who searches for atoms and molecules in the external world, for example, instead of envisioning spiritual beings behind the sensory veil, will be considered to have pathological opinions. People will think that he is suffering from a certain sickness of soul that can be designated as a mental deficiency. The view that the external world is not a “phenomenon” in Goethe's sense, but that behind it something like real atoms and molecules are concealed, will be considered feebleminded. Such a view will be called mentally defective, not wrong, because people will find that it proceeds from an inadequate organization of the whole human being. It would also not be called wrong but childish to describe what arises out of the body's organization as a result of the metabolic processes—the combustion processes arising from the liver, the stomach, the blood circulation, and so on as an exalted mystic does. It can be described accurately, but it is a matter of what standpoint one takes. However, if you consider it as something other than the flame that flares up out of the organization, it would be childish. I told you earlier that the word "childishness" has a different connotation on the other side of the threshold than on this side.^T1 Seen from this side, you realize that the human being must mature in the course of his life between birth and death. He must become composed and sober and, unlike a child, cannot remain playful in his opinions. If, on the other hand, you Look from yonder side of the threshold, from the super-sensible world, into the sense world and observe the growing child, you see how the human being descended from the spiritual world and took hold of the physical body. You also see how the entity that descended works in a sculpturing manner on the corporeality in the physical world. In an entirely different way you then see that the soul-spiritual element is much more perfect than what we can develop in the life between birth and death as our reasoning power, our intellectuality.

I indicated earlier³⁴ that between birth and death the human being is capable of inwardly attaining to the wisdom which, out of the spiritual world, is actively involved in shaping the human brain and the remaining human organization. Philosophers such as Max Dessoir,³⁵ for example, took exception to these views, because when they mention the soul they have no idea what soul and spirit really are. Speaking from the other side of the threshold, “childishness” signifies that the soul-spiritual element of the child's head works on the physical head. What we designate as genius from this side of the threshold is nothing but the preservation of a portion of this “childishness,” “child-headedness,” throughout life. It is only when you retain too much of this childlike quality and you cannot realize how it surges forth out of the seething organism as the inner spark, the inner divine element, that genius turns into excessive “childheadedness,” namely, “childishness.” This is something that must be comprehended quite objectively. We must only be aware that on the other side these matters must be defined differently than on this side and that words receive another meaning. When we use the word “Kindskoepfigkeit” (childishness) on this side of the threshold, we really mean something negative. When we speak from the other side, we refer to the quality that remains in the human being in the right sense as genius and in the pathological sense as false mysticism.

Returning once again from the merely abstract and logical to reality, when We speak of right and wrong, we refer to something that exists in the human being only as thought, a mere discrepancy between the inner and the outer realm, but when we speak of an unhealthy opinion, we indicate that something is amiss in the human being. This is the case, for example, when a person takes the world of phenomena to be a real, material world, or mysticism to be a direct divine manifestation within, instead of the flickering of organic processes. Knowledge, then, must become real, factual. This is the essential point towards which we will have to aim through spiritual science, namely, to refer to the factual, the real, once more, not simply the logical, when we speak of what comes from the human being.

As I said, even in the early ages of ancient Greece such talk of right and wrong in the modern logical sense would not have been understood. The old Greeks still spoke of healthy and unhealthy opinions. The followers of Platonism then gradually worked to achieve logic, which reached its culmination during Roman civilization and continued on into later periods.

Under certain suppositions, the judgments of right and wrong received a special expression in Scholasticism, judgments that were like an echo of the Roman manner of judging, only in a different area. People are still far from regaining a spiritual comprehension of healthy and unhealthy opinions in our time; instead, they aim in a different direction. They have worked their way to something entirely apart from man insofar as making judgments is concerned. When I say that a person makes healthy or unhealthy judgments, I refer to his organization. When I say: This person makes right or wrong judgments, I only make a statement about his condition of soul and frame of mind I mean thereby that he is either a simpleton or an intelligent person, referring to characteristics of his. Lately, however, people have departed from that. Already, a particular world conception has taken hold of a number of individuals. Among those who will not find their way to spiritual-scientific views, this world conception will become popular, will become ever more and more widespread. It is something that proceeds from America but already makes itself felt in Europe, although, to begin with, only among the philosophers who always seem to have the edge on such matters. I am referring to so-called pragmatism. It is no longer concerned with right and wrong in the sense of the logic of antiquity; it maintains that right is what enables a person to adjust well to life. A person who maintains something that is not advantageous to him in life says that it is damaging. On the other hand, if he holds a view whereby he cleverly masters life, then he calls it something useful. Among pragmatists the views of right and wrong are considered so much nonsense, an illusion that people succumb to. An entire school of philosophy has sprung up around pragmatism which, as I said, is more widely known in America than here, but is also beginning to show up in Europe in a variety of forms. This school of thought regards right and wrong as illusory, and believes that what is termed right or true is called that by man only because he finds it useful in life. Man judges something to be false or wrong because it is detrimental in life. In Germany where people are always the most thorough in such matters, this view has attained quite a special development in the so-called “philosophy of the as-if.”³⁶ It originated from a man by the name of Vaihinger and has already found some popularity—I believe there is even an “as-if science,” or something like that. The latter says that we cannot assert that atoms and molecules exist. We can, however, say that we view the world with an eye to what is useful. It serves our purpose to view the world “as if” there were molecules and atoms; it is useful to us to view the world's course “as if” ethical ideals were made manifest. We behold the world “as if” it were ruled by a God. This “as-if” philosophy is quite characteristic of our times. It is the German version of American pragmatism, which has found disciples here. One of them, for example, is Wilhelm Jerusalem,³⁷ who has gone so far as to say that the qualifications true and false originally signified nothing else but something useful or disadvantageous in a dialectical sense. When we have to conclude that a person has a wrong idea about something, but this simultaneously helps him to become rich and well adjusted to life, these logicians come and say, “His idea is true!” To us, this is an illusion. In reality, it is not true, but something that is beneficial to him, which is then reinterpreted and called “true,” and whatever is disadvantageous is then considered incorrect, untrue.

In another passage by Jerusalem we find, "The evaluation, which is subject to an interpretation carried out on the basis of usefulness or disadvantage, and the measure taken on the same basis, is nothing else but the origin of the concepts true and false." Sorry, I cannot read it to you differently; this is philosophical style!

It really is almost legal jargon. You can see that here the concepts true and false are traced back to the concepts of usefulness and disadvantage. This is absolutely the lowest level. We proceed from the concepts of healthy and pathological and then find the concepts of right and wrong. These concepts still adhere to man. One who has a right opinion is called intelligent, one who judges wrongly is called stupid. But it is at least something that still points to human qualities. Now we go so far that we find truth only in what is useful, wrong only in what is detrimental. This is the truth of the present! Philosophers put it into words; others actually judge accordingly, but they are just not aware of it. Particularly social opinions, when voiced, are expressed from none other than this standpoint.

Evolution must again continue in an upward direction. In the presence of truth, we must be capable, first of all, of having a feeling, an inner experience that in itself gives us a feeling of salubriousness. We must feel happy, so to say, in the face of truth and unhappy in the presence of the false. Our age demands this; we must strive for this in a healthy manner. We have to return again to the concepts of true and false, but with feeling.

This is what must take hold of humanity as inner cultural education, namely, that the concepts of true and false are not treated in the complacent manner customary today, but that man can have an inward Part in truth and error. When one has insight into the necessities of the present age, it is a very painful experience to see that people have gradually become so indifferent to one or the other assertion. Even just a century ago it was otherwise. You should have seen what would have happened if a gathering of people a hundred years ago had been told that, looked at from the other side, childishness signifies the same thing which, when seen from this side, is designated under certain circumstances as genius! A Wilhelm von Humboldt or a Fichte would have jumped up from their seats, if something like this had been stated in those days when man was still involved with all his being in such matters. Nowadays, people do not get stirred up when one or another contention is made. The souls are asleep today. To have to encounter these sleeping souls at every step is something that fills one who comprehends the demands of our age with pain. As the most extreme result of this drowsiness in our age, we now have the theosophical movement whose followers wish to feel an inner sensual pleasure. They like matters expressed in such a way that everybody is gently calmed down more and more. A harmonious mood is supposed to pour over the listeners, gradually lulling everybody to sleep. It is just then, when everything can slowly, gently drift into sleep, that the eternal mystical element is felt!

This is what must change again. What we require is that our hearts leap in one or the other direction depending on the kind of assertion that is made. Then, one will no longer analyze with mere logical neutrality whether something is right or wrong; one will feel well or sick depending on whether something is experienced as right or wrong. From that point, still further progress will be made. Spiritual science, however, has to cultivate this already now as an impulse that must penetrate us. We will have to return in full consciousness to where we judge something to be healthy or pathological. This, in turn, must affect the will. What we formerly experienced merely as true or false must now fill us inwardly with will, as it were. The will must be aroused. We must will the right; we must not will but rather destroy what is wrong, namely, what is sick. We must aspire to this change of attitude in man. It is not a matter merely of striving for another more or less correct view that can subsequently be discussed. Instead, we must aim for something that makes human beings sound inside. Our understanding must not merely aim for something concerning which we can then say that it is logically correct. It must lead to action, to reality, by means of which something happens.

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It is life that is of importance to true, genuine spiritual science, not something that inhabits the head of a professor who today sits in his chair and with complete indifference holds forth on truth and error, till his listeners, vexed by his neutrality, could climb the walls. Certainly, many people would now interject that it is precisely inner calmness and tranquility that should be developed. Such matters must not be misunderstood. Inner calm and equanimity signify balance. This implies that We are capable of taking the side of the sound opinion, but that we are also able to develop the counter-forces so as to remain in balance in spite of taking sides, meaning that we always have ourselves under control. Conscious balance differs from drowsy inner balance. Thus, you see that what we call an evolution in the spiritual scientific sense must reach deeply into the innermost definitions of truth.

We cannot speak about man's faculties between death and a new birth if we do not become accustomed to using words in a way differing entirely from how it is done in today's spoken language. This is why people who wish to hear only what they already know will always find the language of spiritual science unintelligible. For not only would they have to accustom themselves to the fact that the words are connected in a different manner, but that a content other than the one heretofore understood is poured into the words. It is only when we thus look into human evolution that we acquire the ability to judge how different the human being was in prehistoric times; how he will change again in the far-off future, and how we must evaluate what presently confronts us in the intermediary stage of civilization. Our age is beset by such catastrophic dangers that it is imperative to come round to a real knowledge of man. At the moment, we in Europe find ourselves at a most important, decisive point. Most people have no inkling of what goes on in the complicated organism of public life. The present days are almost more significant for the continuing progress of European civilization than the days of the recent past. People will have to get used to the fact that the wish to cling to the old is destructive, and that only a firm reliance on the sources of spiritual science will lead us forward.

It is strange how a certain insight gained beyond the threshold in the spiritual worlds casts its shadows into this arch-materialistic age. Two or three years ago one became the subject of ridicule if one spoke about the impulses proceeding from certain secret Western societies that determine public affairs. I gave a whole series of lectures³⁸ here concerning these matters, and a number of you will have become familiar with their content in one way or another. One was laughed at, more or less, if one mentioned that public affairs are penetrated by forces whose origin is discovered when light is thrown upon certain secret societies that follow the traditions of ancient initiation wisdom but apply the latter in the wrong direction. Today, in a relatively short time, things have changed. For a week, the sober English press, which is indeed not inclined to lend itself to special capers, has brought out articles about the existence of secret societies. Even though these articles deal with starting points that are nothing but what is put out by the Jesuits, one nonetheless must admit that even though the wind blows from quite the wrong corner it still catches people's attention. What is discussed for as long as a week with, let me say, philosophical exactitude indicates how thoroughly the world has changed in this regard in the last few years. People easily overlook it, however, when the sober English newspapers³⁹ print compilations today such as the one showing that in 1897 the world was confronted with something like a description of future events. Something like this appears in the columns on the left-hand side while on the right side appear the programs of the Bolshevists and current events. What was known already in 1897 is happening today; one can prove philologically that today's events correspond to the earlier forecast. Naturally, people point to these matters journalistically without having any knowledge about the deeper relationships; hardly anybody today senses what he is dealing with. What this is all about is that there are individuals, standing far in the background of what happens on the surface, who with a firm hand manipulate the strings leading to current events. Yet they wish to remain unknown and therefore transfer to others what would otherwise be traced back to them. What is printed is a fabrication, but a carefully calculated one, especially when its origins are considered, because it is designed to lay the blame on others so that mankind will not suspect those who are actually pulling the strings. As I said, today one must feel the responsibility to face what is actually taking place.

I said to many a person in 1914: It is not permissible to write the history of that catastrophic war, which began in 1914, in the manner in which such events were reported in former days simply by drawing on the archives. If one really wishes to comprehend what had its start in 1914, one must resort to the occult means of thinking. One has to clearly understand that some of the most eminent individuals, who participated throughout the civilized world in bringing about the catastrophe, suffered from a benumbed, dimmed consciousness. Such moments, however, when people become benumbed in their consciousness, are the gateways through which the Ahrimanic powers enter the world, governing and taking charge. If a person occupies an important position but in a decisive moment suffers a dimming down of consciousness, he no longer rules; Ahriman rules through him. Spiritual forces extend their rule into this world, such as those I now refer to, in this case of Ahrimanic nature. The events of the last few years can only be understood if one is willing to trace these relationships in a spiritual-scientific manner. It will become increasingly impossible to comprehend what is happening throughout the civilized world unless one is ready to understand it on the basis of spiritual science. One can have endless discussions about what this or that person said three or four years ago or today. It is much more important to acquire a knowledge of man, so that it is possible to ascertain how sound or unsound a person was or is in a given position, for it depends on that whether benign or evil powers affect the course of events. It is true that the path to forming judgments in this manner is not strewn with roses. For when people are asked to form judgments in this manner concerning the interplay in the sense world of supersensory or subsensory powers, they are easily tempted to lose their heads in mystical arrogance.

He who would seriously nurture spiritual science requires not only the normal degree of sobriety but a higher form of it; no rapture, no losing of oneself, but a firm stand on a solid basis of reality. This is what is necessary. We must train ourselves toward reality if we wish to form judgments the way they really ought to be formed today.

It is a great danger when anyone says that his pronouncements are the result of higher powers, not of what he does or does not wish. Nothing but pure egotism is usually concealed behind that. Mystics who present themselves to the world as bearers of this or that spiritual entity are most frequently the biggest of egotists. This is why the first requirement on the path to a certain higher knowledge is the development of sobriety, the ability to disregard everything connected with egotism. As a rule, fanatical ecstasy is nothing but an alternate form of egotism. It is also particularly important that mankind cultivate a certain sense of humor on its path to spirituality. The world is far removed from such humor today. It is extraordinarily difficult to cope with the world's opinion in regard to these matters, because everything possible that organically exists and works in the depths of human nature adds its voice to it.

Perhaps a first indication has now been given of what has to be pointed out in order to stress the significance, on the one hand, of the path leading to the attainment of a spiritual opinion, on the other, the difficulty and danger of this path. We must be aware of these two aspects. We must not allow ourselves to be held back because of the dangers involved; we also may not become remiss in face of the efforts required truly to form an opinion in accordance with the spirit. These points must always be kept in mind when trying to understand the human being of the present time, and without understanding him in this way, we cannot arrive at a social opinion. Man must be comprehended in such a manner that he is fully appraised as a body, soul, and spirit; that not only his life between birth and death but also his life between death and a new birth is taken into consideration. Basically, judgments such as “useful” or “detrimental” have no validity for the life between death and a new birth; the opinions “healthy” or “unhealthy” make much sense for that period. There, human souls are either “healthy” or “unhealthy” due to the after-effects of earthly life. To consider the concepts "useful" or “damaging” as “right” or “wrong” in the sense that we explained it here implies limiting all world observation merely to a physical world. The existence in the present of pragmatism and a philosophy of the “as-if” is the surest sign that people have no feeling at all for what lies across the threshold from the physical world in the spiritual realm.

A sound social view, however, will only come about on the Basis of this initiation science. Let us take one area of the threefold social organism, held by some to be the most material and prosaic, namely, the economic life. We know that the economy will only develop in a healthy direction when it evolves under the principle of associations. What does that imply? It means that in the future people will in no way acquire an economic opinion for themselves through the single individuality. Of course, epistemologically it will stem from the individuality, but it will not be developed by it. To a properly evolved mankind of the future, the forming of an economic opinion merely out of the individuality will seem like the famous sleeper, depicted by Jean Paul, who wakes up in the middle of the night in a dark room, sees nothing, hears nothing and ponders what time it is, trying to figure this out by thinking about it. One must be in harmony with one's surroundings if one wishes to form an idea of what time it is in the middle of the night. And in the future, if one is to arrive at an economic opinion—concerning, for example, prices or the number of workers that can be employed in a certain branch of the economy—one will have to be in close contact with associations, those active in production in this particular branch and those representing its consumers. As a result of such cooperation between associations it will be possible to form a valid judgment. The way one tries to do it today, proceeding from the individuality, is the same thing as what the above mentioned fellow does who has been asleep and attempts to calculate all by himself what time it is. Recent events have demonstrated how far one gets with an opinion that is not based on associative experience.

I have cited another example as well to a number of you already. In the nineteenth century learned discussions were held concerning the usefulness of the gold standard. From the middle well into the last third of the nineteenth century, representatives from all the parliaments of Europe, as well as from any number of practical spheres, always found the most beautiful and ingenious reasons why a gold standard should replace bimetalism.⁴⁰ What did they expect from it? They claimed that the gold standard would bring about free trade. What happened in reality? Protective tariffs everywhere—the opposite of what all those smart economists and parliamentarians had predicted! I am not trying to be funny when I say “those smart people.” They were all in error, yet I am not calling them stupid or foolish; they really were smart. They did not have economic experience, however; for this sort of experience cannot be fabricated out of thin air or developed through pondering. It can only be attained when, in associative connections, one draws lines from one area to another. Just as we read time from the clocks, so, from the associations, we shall read the basics for an economic judgment that can lead to actions.

What does all this signify? You will recall my frequent references to the existence of a kind of group opinion, a group soul, at a certain starting point of our human evolution. Whole groups of people instinctively judged and felt alike. Indeed, languages would never have developed if people had not formed opinions as groups. There even existed a group memory, as I have outlined in some of my lecture cycles.⁴¹ Thus, humanity's evolution proceeded from groups, from instinctive group opinions. It then descended to its lowest point, and will ascend again through associations, but consciously this time by uniting people once again in groups, in associations, that support and base themselves on their economic judgment. People once again ascend to an associative opinion. However, this will be accomplished by the conscious forming of such groups; what happened formerly out of atavistic instinct will now happen in full consciousness. Here, you again have one of the reasons that can be given on the basis of spiritual science for the necessity of a social development such as set forth in my book, Towards Social Renewal. These matters are of such a nature that they can be established with absolute mathematical certainty if one turns to the sources of true perception. These matters are not made public recklessly and lightly; they are brought up from the very foundations of human life. What is necessary for our time is to build a world in a social manner that is based on insight into human nature. We cannot advance without that. All talk about leftist or rightist politics, all dogmatic dictates that men have for believing in a God, everything from a philistine to a liberal conception of women's rights, from the most reactionary to the Bolshevistic side, remains empty talk without such insight, talk not founded on reality, which will lead only into destruction. Reality will only be grasped by means of spiritual experience. Then, however, one must be capable of entering into a true knowledge of the human being. One must be able to see how this associative element, required in the economic life with full consciousness, will result in an ascending development in respect to what had been lost of the atavistic, instinctive judgment during the descent. We deal here with true, genuine, totally discernible science; a science that is as lucid as the Pythagorean theorem, even though today's scientists pay little heed to its lucidity. Yet we must have a sufficient number of human beings who can comprehend the crystal clarity of those judgments which alone are the only ones able to lead from our decline to an ascent by drawing on the sources of spiritual science.

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I intended all this as a sort of introduction also for tomorrow, when we are going to speak in lectures and free discussions about the forming of social judgments and the necessities of doing that in the present-day social conditions.

• 32. See lecture by Rudolf Steiner, “Urteilsbildung in den drei Gliedern des sozialen Organismus” in Gegenwart, 1950/51, #7 and 8/9. Not translated.
• 33. Johann Gottlieb Fichte: 1762–1814. The quotation literally says: “The kind of philosophy one chooses depends ... on what kind of human being one is ... A philosophical system is not just a pile of inanimate household goods that one can either dispose of or accept any way one likes; it is ensouled by the soul of him who has it.” In “Erste und zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre und Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre,” 1779.
• T1. Note by translator: In German, the word for “childishness” is “Kindskoepfigkeit,” literally meaning “child-headedness.” Hence the references below to the head, etc.
• 34. Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity, GA 15 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1970).
• 35. Max Dessoir: 1867–1947. Compare this with Rudolf Steiner: Von Seelenraetseln, GA 20 (Dornach, 1960). Not translated.
• 36. Hans Vaihinger: 1852–1933, Die Philosophie des Als-Ob. System der theoretischen, praktischen und religioesen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus. Berlin, 1911.
• 37. Wilhelm Jerusalem: 1842–1910, who in 1908 published a translation of Pragmatism by William James.
• 38. Rudolf Steiner: Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Part I, GA 173 (Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1966). Not translated.
• 39. Appeared in “The Morning Post,” London, July 12–30, 1920. Also published in pamphlet form, The Causes of World Unrest, London, 1920.
• 40. Bimetalism: The policy of using two metals (mostly gold and silver) jointly as a monetary standard. In most cases, replaced by the gold standard since the second half of the nineteenth century.
• 41. Rudolf Steiner: Egyptian Myths and Mysteries, GA 106 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1971).

Once again, I would like to sum up some of what has been presented here recently. We spoke about the external sense world in its relation to the inner world of the human being and I pointed out two things in particular. I stressed that the external sense world certainly must be understood as a world of phenomena and that it is a sign of the prejudices of our age not to interpret correctly this view of the world of phenomena. Certainly, here and there, a certain perception surfaces concerning the fact that the outer sense world is a world of phenomena, of appearances, not one even of merely material realities. Then, however, behind this world of external phenomena, one seeks for material realities, for example, for atoms and molecules, and the like. This search for atoms and molecules, in short, for any world of physical reality standing behind the world of phenomena, is just as if one were to seek for some kind of molecular materiality behind the rainbow that is obviously only an appearance, a phenomenon. This search for material reality in regard to the external world is something quite unfounded, as spiritual science points out from the most diverse directions. We have to understand clearly that surrounding us in what we perceive as the sense world is a world of phenomena, and we may not interpret the sense of touch differently from the other senses in regard to the sense world. Just as we see the rainbow with our eyes without searching for a material reality behind it, accepting it as appearance, so we must accept the entire external world as it is, namely, in the sense I depicted it decades ago in my introduction to the volume an color theory⁴² in Goethe's natural scientific writings. The question then is posed to us: What is it that really stands behind this world of phenomena? The material atoms are not behind it; there are spiritual beings behind it—there is spirituality. This recognition signifies a lot, for it means that we admit that we do not live in a material world but in one of spiritual realities.

When we as human beings turn to the external world this drawing representing, as it were, the boundary of our body—we have here the sense world and behind it the world of spiritual realities, spiritual beings (right side).

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Now, when we turn to the human interior, when we move from our senses inward, we have first of all the content of our world of conceptions, our soul world. If we call the sense world the world of sense phenomena, of sensory appearances, we have the world of spiritual phenomena when we turn from our senses inward (left). Naturally, in the manner in which they are present within us, our thoughts, our conceptions, are not realities, they are spiritual phenomena. Now, if we descend from this soul world still deeper into our inner being, it is all-important for us not to believe that we thereby arrive at a special, higher world, something that mystic dreamers presuppose. There, we actually come into the world of our organism, the world of material realities.

This is why it is important not to assume that by inward brooding one could discover something spiritual; there, we should seek for the constitution of the material human organism. One should not seek for all manner of mystical realities within oneself, as I have pointed out from a number of viewpoints. Instead, behind what pushes up into the soul and thus turns into a spiritual phenomenon, especially when one penetrates more and more deeply into oneself, we should seek the interaction of liver, heart, lungs, and other organs that mystics in particular do not like to hear mentioned. There we become acquainted with the essentially material element of our earthly existence. As I have often emphasized, many a person who believes he has encountered mystical realities by descending deeply into his inner being only finds what is given off by his liver, gall bladder and other related organs. Just as tallow turns into flame, so everything that liver, lungs, heart and stomach give off turns into mystical phenomena when it lights up into consciousness.

The important point is that true spiritual science guides the human being beyond any sort of illusion. Materialists cling to the illusion that they can find physical, material realities, not spiritual realities, behind the sense world. It is the illusion of mystics that when they descend into their own being, they can find, not the world of the material organization, but different kinds of special divine sparks, and such like.

In genuine spiritual science, it is important that we do not search for material substance in the outer world and do not seek the Spirit in the inner world, which initially appears as such through inward brooding.

What I have now said is of significant consequence for our entire world view. Bear in mind that from the time man falls asleep until he wakes up he is outside his physical and etheric bodies with his astral body and I. Where is he then? This is the question we must ask ourselves. If we assume that out there is the world described by the physicists, it makes no sense whatever to speak about an existence of the astral body or the ego outside the physical body. If we know, however, that beyond the sense world lies the world of spiritual realities, out of which the sense world blossoms forth, then we are able to imagine that the astral body and ego move into the spiritual world which lies behind the sense world. Indeed, astral body and ego find themselves in that part of the spiritual world that underlies the sense world. Thus, we can say that in sleep man penetrates into the spiritual world which is the basis of the physical world. Of course, upon awakening, his ego and astral body first penetrate his etheric being and then what constitutes the realm of the material organization.

Clear concepts of an anthroposophical world-view can only be attained if one is able to form intelligible ideas concerning such matters. For, above all, one will not succumb to the illusion of seeking the divine, or the spiritual underlying our human condition, behind the sensory surroundings. There, only that spiritual element is found which, out of itself, brings forth the sense world. As human beings we have our roots in the spiritual world, but in which spiritual world? We have our roots in the very spiritual world that we leave when incarnating into our physical body. We come from the spiritual world that we live in between death and a new birth; through birth or conception we enter this physical existence. The world we inhabit between death and a new birth, which we then leave, is a different spiritual world than this one [behind the sense world], although, because it is a spiritual world, it is related to the latter from which springs forth our sense world. We will not grasp the spiritual world of which we are speaking—I have described it in the lecture cycle, Inner Nature of Man and the Life Between Death and a New Birth,⁴³ namely, the spiritual world we experience between death and rebirth which creates and brings us forth—if we seek it behind the sense world. We will not take hold of it if we seek it within ourselves. There, we only discover the material element of our own organization. We can only grasp it when we leave space altogether. This spiritual world is not within space. As I have often emphasized, we can only speak about it when we base it solely on time, thinking of it as a world of time. Consequently, it goes without saying that all the descriptions we have about this world between death and rebirth can only be images, merely pictures. We must not confuse these pictures, in which we must of necessity express ourselves, with the realities in which we dwell between death and a new birth. It is vital that on the basis of the anthroposophical world-view we do not merely talk about all manner of fantastic things, depicting them in the ancient terminology which actually does not designate anything new. What matters is that we enrich our world of concepts and ideas when we try to send our thoughts into the world in which we live between death and rebirth. Thus we can acquire a most important concept that can also give rise to profound, albeit uncomfortable, reflection. It is this: When we have absolved the life between death and birth, we incarnate here in space. We penetrate into space out of a condition that is not spatial. Space has significance only for our experiences between birth and death. Again, it is important to know that when we pass through the portal of death, not only do we leave the body with our soul, we also leave space behind.

This concept was quite familiar to people until the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries A.D. Even a person like Scotus Erigena,⁴⁴ who lived in the ninth century, was fully conversant with it. Yet the modern age has completely lost the concept of the spirituality underlying human existence, within which the human being lives after death—as was thought then, only after death; today we must say: between death and rebirth we are outside space. The modern age is proud and arrogant regarding its thinking, yet it can actually think only of what is spatial, holding any and every thought in a spatial context. In order to conceive of spiritual matters, on the one hand, we must make the effort to overcome space within our thinking. Otherwise we will never reach the truly spiritual; above all, we will never attain to an even approximately correct natural science, much less a spiritual science. Particularly in our time it is infinitely important to become acquainted with these finer distinctions of spiritual-scientific knowledge. For, what we acquire through such concepts is not just any kind of world concept, any sort of thought content. The acquisition of a thought content is, after all, the very least we can achieve through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For it is one and the same whether someone believes the world consists of molecules and atoms, or if he believes man consists of a physical body, a somewhat less dense etheric body, then something more nebulous and tenuous, the astral body, followed by whatever is next, say, a still finer mental body, or something even more and more rarefied; for one doesn't come anywhere near the etheric body by just thinking of something more rarefied. It is really the same thing whether one is a materialist picturing the world as atoms, or whether one harbors this coarsely materialistic conception that is the common factor of the so-called theosophical society teachings, or whatever they are called now. Something quite different is what really matters, namely, that we become capable of changing our entire soul constitution. We have to make every effort to think about the spiritual in a manner different from the one in which we are accustomed to think about the external sense world. We do not comprehend spiritual science if we conceive of something other than the sense world as being spiritual; we enter into spiritual science if we think about the spiritual in a different way than we think about the sense realm. We think of the latter in terms of space. We can think about the spiritual world in terms of time within certain limits, because we have to think of ourselves within this spiritual world. And we are in a certain sense spiritually conditioned by time, in that at a certain moment in time we are transposed from the life between death and rebirth into the life between birth and death.

As I have often indicated, it is this transformation of the state of mind that is so absolutely essential for mankind of today. For how did we become caught up in the calamities of the present? It is because, along with so-called modern progress, humanity has altogether forgotten to admit the spiritual into its conceptions. The theosophical teachings of the so-called Theosophical Society are actually the attempt to characterize spiritual facts in materialistic forms of thought, hence, to drive materialism all the way into the spirit. We do not attain to a spiritual concept merely by calling something spiritual, only by transforming our thinking to what is suited to the sensory realm.

Human beings do not live with each other only in purely spatial relationships that can be constructed by means of what has become the general thinking of natural science. We can no longer develop social concepts based on the present-day world view. The kind of thinking that humanity has become accustomed to owing to natural science cannot lead to a characterization of social life. In this way arise the aberrations we experience today as a variety of social ideologies that only come about because it is impossible to think realistically about the social problems based on the conceptions from which we proceed to regard something as right or wrong. Not until people are willing to penetrate spiritual science will it become possible again to think of the social life in the manner it has to be conceived if further decline is to be halted and, instead, progress is to ensue. The discipline brought about in us by spiritual science is more important than its content. Otherwise we shall finally reach the stage of demanding that spiritual matters be popularized, that is to say, that they be presented in coarsely sensory, realistic terms. Things that must be expressed in a certain manner if one doesn't want to fantasize but to speak of realities, as I have done in our anthroposophical presentations as well as in my book, Towards Social Renewal,⁴⁵ are found to be not graphic enough. Well, “graphic” is a word that has a peculiar connotation for people today. There are people today who have much to say about this longing of mankind to have everything presented in a crudely senseperceptible manner. This is true all over the world, not just in certain countries.

I found an interesting passage, for example, in a recently published book, Les forces morales aux Etats-Unis,⁴⁶ written by a French lady. It has the following subdivisions: l'eglise, l'ecole, la femme. The book contains an interesting little episode which demonstrates how, in certain quarters, one triel “graphically” to describe matters pertaining to man's relationship with the spiritual world. The author relates:

One evening a friend and I strolled down Broadway. I came to a church. A quick glance showed us the place was filled with men only. Offended by seeing this, we avoided moving further inside. A priest clad in a soutane saw us, approached and invited us to come in. Since we hesitated, he asked about our confession. “We are not Catholics,” I said. He urged us to enter the church and, index finger pointing upward, he said with conviction “Come here and listen to me. If, for instance, you wish to travel to Chicago, how would you go about it? You might go on foot, take a car, a boat, or travel by train. It stands to reason that you would choose the fastest and most comfortable means. In this case that's the train. Obviously, if you wish to get to the Garden of God you will choose the religion that will get you there in the fastest and safest way. That's the Catholic religion, which is the express train to Paradise.”

The Lady telling the story only concluded that she was so perplexed she did not think of telling him that he had forgotten the airplane in his graphic comparison, which he could have mentioned as a still quicker means of getting to Paradise.

You see, here was someone eager to counter people's prejudices, and he chose graphic conceptions. The description of the Catholic Church as the “express train to heaven” is a graphic image. It is indeed the tendency of our time to search for graphic images, meaning concepts that do not make any demands on people's thinking. It is precisely here that we must already discern the gravity of modern life which demands that we do away with such graphicness which turns into banality and triviality, thus pulling man down into materialism in regard to those matters that must be comprehended spiritually. Even in symptoms such as these we have to search for what is needed most in our age. It must be said again and again: Such symptoms cannot be ignored; we cannot afford to go blindfolded through the world, which is an organism asking to be understood by means of its symptoms. For these symptoms contain what we must comprehend if we wish to arrive at an ascent again from our general decline.

At this point, however, it is necessary to see a number of things in the right light. What has actually been produced from spiritual-scientific foundations in Towards Social Renewal truly has not been created out of some theory but out of the whole breadth of life, with the difference that this life is viewed spiritually. Mankind today cannot progress if people do not adjust to such a view of life.

I would like to put in here two points taken from life that once again showed me recently how necessary it is to lead humanity today to a life-filled comprehension of reality, but at the same time a spiritual comprehension of reality. Yesterday I read an article by a journalist whose name, so I am told, is Rene Marchand,⁴⁷ who, for a long time, was a correspondent for Figaro, Petit Parisien, and so on. He participated in the war on the Russian front, being a radical opponent of the Bolsheviks. He then had dealings with the general of the counter-revolution, becoming a follower of it. Overnight, he became converted to the idea of workers' councils, to Bolshevism. From an opponent of Bolshevism, so it says here, he turned into a protagonist, an unreserved supporter of the leadership and the ideology of workers' councils. Here is a man who belongs to the intellectual class, for he is a journalist, who, after all, lives with a deeper understanding of life, a deeper sensitivity for life, who dwells in the old traditions as do most of today's sleeping souls. It is interesting how such a person suddenly realizes: All this will assuredly lead to destruction!—and now the only goal worth aiming at for him appears to be Bolshevism! In other words, the man now perceives that everything that is not Bolshevism leads to ruin. I explained to you how Spengler described this.⁴⁸ Marchand sees only Bolshevism; initially, he believes that Bolshevism is merely a Russian affair. Then he discovers something quite different. He feels that Bolshevism is an international matter that must spread over the whole world. He says:

It now became clear to me that peace can only be restored when the people in all the countries freely take their destiny into their own hands. The principles, hitherto proclaimed by the bourgeois governments merely to deceive the masses, can only become reality when this new imperialism (that of the Entente powers) has in turn broken down.

He then relates how he has now arrived at the conviction that justice, unity, peace, and law will only rule when the world has become bolshevistic through and through; not till then will reconstruction be possible. This man now sees that all else leads to destruction. And basically he is quite correct in pointing out: If anything outside Bolshevism is to be cultivated further, it must turn into the dictatorship of the old capitalism, the Bourgeoisie and its trappings. It must become the dictatorship of people like Lloyd George,⁴⁹ Clemenceau,⁵⁰ Scheidemann,⁵¹ and so on. If one does not wish for this, if one does not want ruin, there is no other choice but the dictatorship of Bolshevism. He sees the only salvation in the letter.

In a certain sense this man is honest, more honest than all the others who see the approach of Bolshevism and believe they can oppose it with the old regime. At least Marchand sees that all the old ideas are ready to perish. A question arises, however, especially if one stands on spiritual scientific ground and experiences this; for a man like Rene Marchand is an exception. The question forces itself upon one's mind: Where has the man gained knowledge of all this? He has acquired such knowledge where most of our contemporaries have gathered it, namely, from newspapers and books. He does not know life. To a large extent, people living today know -life only from newspapers and books. Particularly the people in leading circles know life just from newspapers. Think of all that we have experienced in this regard through newspapers, by means of books! We have witnessed that a few decades ago people still formed their world conceptions by reading French comedies, that they knew the events occurring in a comedy better than what takes place in life. They ignored the realities of life and informed themselves by what they had seen on the stage. Later, we saw that people formed their view of life based on Ibsen, Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy. They did not know life; neither could they judge the books on the basis of life. Actually, people only assimilated the secondhand life printed on paper. From that they developed their slogans, founded societies for all manner of reforms without any real knowledge of life. It was a life which they knew only from Ibsen or Dostoevsky, or a life they knew in a manner that frequently could not help becoming quite obnoxious to a person when, in all the big cities of Europe, Hauptmann's “Weber” (weavers),⁵² for example, was being performed. The lifestyle of weavers appeared on stage. People with no idea of what transpires in life, having seen only its caricature on the stage, observing the misery of weavers on stage, and because it was a time of social involvement—began talking about all sorts of social questions, having become acquainted with these matters only in this way. Basically, they are all people who do not know life except vicariously from newspapers or books such as exist today. I have nothing against the books; one must be familiar with them, but one must read them in such a manner that through them one is able to perceive life. The problem is that we live in an age of abstraction today, abstract demands by political parties, societies, and so on.

This is why it is interesting for me to encounter, on one side, such a realistic man like Rene Marchand who, being a journalist, is simultaneously an oracle for many people. It does not even occur to him to ask if this Bolshevism really leads to a viable life style. For he really does not know life; he only exchanges what he has become acquainted with and finds headed for destruction, with a new abstract formula, with new theories. On the other side, I must now compare a letter I received this morning with these utterances of an intellectual. Somebody who is fully grounded in life, who has experienced precisely what can be experienced today in order to form an opinion of the social condition, wrote to me. He wrote that my book, Towards Social Renewal, had become a sort of salvation for him. This man, who has worked in a weaving mill, was thoroughly familiar with the practical aspects. One will only grasp what is meant with the book, Towards Social Renewal, when one judges it from the standpoint of practical life. It is a book depicting reality, but derived completely from the spiritual world, as must be the case with anything that is to serve life today. One will only know what is meant if one understands that every line, every word of this book is in no way theoretical, but taken straight from practical life; when one realizes that it is a book for those who wish to intervene actively in life, not for those who want to engage in socialistic chatter and babble about life.

It is this that causes one such pain, namely, that a book steeped in reality is called utopian by those who have no idea of reality. Those who have no inkling of the reality of life, being themselves addicted to literature, view even such a book that is truly taken from life as a piece of literature. Today, the “how” matters more than the “what.” Everything depends an our acquiring thought forms that are suitable tools for the comprehension of the spiritual life, for in reality spiritual life is everywhere. We have spiritual realities here in our surroundings as well as from beyond the sense world. It is out of these spiritual realities that social reconstruction must come about, not out of the empty talk appearing in Leninism and Trotskyism, which is nothing but the squeezed-out lemon of old commonplace Western views that have no power to produce any viable kind of social idea. One may well ask: Where are the human beings today who are prepared to comprehend life with the necessary intensity? We will never penetrate life if we are unwilling to view it from the spiritual standpoint. The life between birth and death will not be understood as long as one is not willing to comprehend the life between death and rebirth. If people are unwilling to resort to the spiritual life, they will either become complete materialists or intellectuals living in theories that only enable them to comprehend life after having had it dramatically presented by an Ibsen, a Dostoevsky, or another writer. What matters is that we interpret library presentations as a kind of window through which we look out upon life. This will be possible for us only if we perceive the spiritual world, the world of spiritual entities, behind the sense world; if we finally dismiss all the fantasies concerning atoms and molecules from which present-day physics wishes to construct a world for us. It would follow from these fantasies that the whole present world in fact really consists basically only of atoms and molecules, effectively eliminating all spiritual, and with it, moral and religious ideas. I will say more about this tomorrow.

• 42. See Note #4
• 43. Rudolf Steiner: Inner Nature of Man and the Life Between Death and a New Birth, GA 153 (London, Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1959).
• 44. Scotus Erigena: 810–877 A.D. Translator of the writings by Dionysius Areopagita; author of “De divina praedestinatione,” “ De divisione naturae.” In 1225, the Vatican ordered all his writings burned.
• 45. See Note #13
• 46. Sophie Cheftele, “Les forces morales aux Etats-Unis (l'eglise, l'ecole, la femme),” Paris, 1920.
• 47. The source of this quote could not be found.
• 48. Rudolf Steiner: Oswald Spengler, Prophet of World Chaos, in GA 198 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1949).
• 49. David Lloyd George: 1863–1945, British statesman, prime minister from 1916 until 1922.
• 50. Eugene Clemenceau: 1841–1929, French statesman.
• 51. Philipp Scheidemann: 1865–1939, German secretary of state, later minister president.
• 52. Gerhart Hauptmann: 1862–1946, playwright; “Die Weber,” Berlin, 1892.

Genuine knowledge of the impulses holding sway in humanity, knowledge that must be acquired if we wish to take a Position in life in any direction, is possible only if we attempt to go deeply into the differences of soul conditions existing between the members of the human race. In respect to the right progress for all mankind, it is certainly necessary that human beings understand one another, that an element common to all men is present. This common element, however, can only develop when we focus on the varieties of soul dispositions and developments that exist among the different members of humanity. In an age of abstract thinking and mere intellectualism such as the one in which we find ourselves, people are only too prone to look only for the abstract common denominators. Because of this they fail to arrive at the actual concrete unity, for it is precisely by grasping the differences that one comprehends the former. From any number of viewpoints, I have referred in particular to the mutual relationships resulting out of these differences between the world's population of the West and East. Today, I should like to point to such differentiations from yet another standpoint.

When we look at the obvious features of present general culture, what do we actually find? The form taken by the thoughts of most people in the civilized world really shows an essentially Western coloring, something originating in the characteristic tendencies of the West. Look at newspapers today that are published in America or England, in France, Germany, Austria or Russia. Although you will definitely sense certain differences in the mode of thinking, and so on, you will also notice one thing they have in common. If this is the Western region here (see sketch), this the middle one and that the Eastern, this common element, which comes to light everywhere, say, in newspapers as well as in ordinary popular literary and scientific publications, does not derive its impulse from the depths of the national characteristics. In a St. Petersburg paper, for instance, you do not find what arises from the heritage of the Russian people. You do not discover the heritage of Central European peoples by reading a Viennese paper or one from Berlin. The element determining the basic configuration and character (of all publications) has basically arisen in the West, and then poured itself into the individual regions. The fundamental coloring of what has come to the fore from among the peoples of the West has, therefore, essentially spread out over the civilized world.

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When things are viewed superficially, one might doubt this; but if you go more deeply into the matters under discussion here, you can no longer doubt them. Consider the attitude, the basic sentiment, the conceptual form, expressed in a newspaper from Vienna or Berlin, or a literary or scientific work from either city. Compare this with a publication from London—quite aside from the language—and you will discover that there is a greater similarity between the publication from London and the book from Vienna, Paris, or even New York or Chicago than there is between the present thoughts and ideas in literary and scientific works from Vienna and Berlin, and the special nuance which Fichte⁵³ for example, poured into his thoughts as an enlivening element. I shall demonstrate this to you by citing just one example.

There is a saying by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great philosopher who was born at the turn of the nineteenth century, that is so characteristic of him that no one today understands it. It goes, “The external world is the substance of duty become visible.” The sentence means nothing less than this. When we look out into the world of mountains, clouds, woods and rivers, of animals, plants and minerals, all this is in itself something devoid of meaning, without reality, it is merely a phenomenon. It is only there to enable the human being in his evolution to fulfill his duty. For I could not carry out my obligations in a world in which I would not be surrounded by things that I could touch. There must be wood, there must be a hammer. In itself, it has no significance and no materiality. It is only the substance of my duty which has become sense-perceptible. Everything outside exists primarily for the purpose of bringing duty to light.

This saying was coined by a man a century ago out of the innermost sentiments of his soul and character as well as his folk spirit. It did not become generally known. When people talk about Johann Gottlieb Fichte today, when they write books about him and mention him in newspaper articles, they only perceive the external form of his words. No one really understands anything about Fichte. You may take everything you find on him today, either literary or scientific, but it has nothing whatever to do with Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It does, however, have a great deal to do with what arose out of the Western folk spirit, and has spread over the rest of the civilized world.

These more delicate relationships are not discerned. That is the reason why nobody even thinks of characterizing in a deep and exhaustive manner the essential feature of what arises from the spirit of the various nationalities. For it is all inundated today by what arises from the West. In Central Europe, in the East, people imagine that they are thinking along their own ethnic lines. This is not the case, they think in accordance with what they have adopted from the West.

In what I am now saying lies the key to much of what is really the riddle of the present age. This riddle can be solved only when we become aware of the specific qualities arising from the various regions of the world. There is, first of all, the East that today certainly offers us no true picture of itself. If untruthfulness were not the underlying characteristic of all public life in our time, the world would not be so ignorant of the fact that what we call Bolshevism is spreading rapidly throughout the East and into Asia; that it has gone far already. People have a great desire to sleep through the actual events, and are glad to be kept in ignorance. It is therefore easy to withhold from them what is really taking place. Thus, people will live to see the East and the whole of Asia inundated by the most extreme, radical product of Western thought, namely Bolshevism, an element utterly foreign to these people.

If we wish to look into what it is that the world of the East brings forth out of the depths of its folk character, it becomes obvious that it is possible to discover the fundamental nuance of feeling in the East only by going back into earlier times and learning through them. For, in regard to its original character, the East has become completely decadent. Forgetting its very nature, the East has allowed itself to be inundated by what I have described as the most extreme, radical offshoots of Western thought. Certainly, it is true that what was once there is still living within Eastern humanity, but today it is all covered up. What once lived in the East, what once vibrated through Eastern souls, survives in its final results where it is no longer understood, where it has turned into a superstitious ritual, where it has become the hypocritical murmurings of the popes of the Orthodox Russian ritual, incomprehensible even to those who believe they understand it. A direct line runs from ancient India to these formulas of the Russian church ritual, which are now only rattled off to the multitudes in the form of lip service. For this whole inclination which thus expressed itself, which bestowed on the Eastern soul its imprint and also does so today in a suppressed form, is the potential for developing a spiritual state of mind that guides the human being towards the prenatal, to what exists in our life before birth, before conception. In the very beginning, the nature of what permeated the East as a world conception and religious attitude was connected with the fact that this East possessed a concept which has been completely lost to the West. As I have said here before, the West has the concept of immortality, not that of “not having been born,” of “unbornness.” We have the word immortality, we do not have the term “unbornness.” This implies that in our thinking we continue life after death, but not into the time before birth. On the other hand, the East possessed that special soul inclination it had that still included Imagination and Inspiration in its thoughts and concepts. By means of this particular manner of expressing the conceptual content of its soul world, the East was far less predisposed to pay heed to the life after death than to that before birth. In regard to the human being it viewed life here in the sense world as something that comes to man after he has received his tasks prior to birth, as something that he has to absolve here in the sense of the task given him. He was disposed to regard this life as a duty set human beings by the gods before they descended into this earthly body of flesh. It goes without saying that such a world conception encompasses both repeated earth lives and the lives between death and birth; for one can quite well speak of a single life after death, but not of only one before birth. That would be an impossible teaching. After all, one who refers at all to pre-existence would then not speak of one earth life only, which is something that should be obvious to you upon reflection. It was the way they had of looking up into the supersensory world, which was brought about by the whole predisposition of these Eastern souls, but it was one that focused their attention on the life we lead between death and a new birth prior to being drawn down to earthly life. Everything else, everything in the way of political, social, historical and economical ideas was only the consequence of what dwelt in the soul due to the orientation towards the life between birth and conception.

This life, this mood of soul, is particularly fitted to turn the human soul's gaze to the spiritual, to fill man with the super-sensible world. For even here on earth, man considers himself entirely a creation of the spiritual world, indeed, as a being who, in the world of the senses, is merely pursuing his super-sensible life. Everything that became decadent in later ages, the establishment of kingdoms, the social structure of the ancient Orient and its very constitution, developed from this special underlying mood of soul. This soul condition might be said today to be overpowered, because it became weak and crippled, because it was only promulgated as if out of what I would like to call “rachitic” soul members, as for example, in the works of Rabindranath Tagore,⁵⁴ which are like something that is poured into vague, nebulous formulas. In actual practice, we are today inundated by what expresses itself in Bolshevism as the most extreme, radical wing of Western thinking. The West will have to experience that something it did not wish to have for itself is moving over into the East, that in a not very distant future, what the West pushed off on the East will surge back upon it from there. This will result in a strange kind of self-knowledge.

What has this remarkable development in the East led to? It has led the people of the East to employ the holy inner zeal they once utilized to foster the impulse for the supersensory world and to apprehend the spiritual in all its purity, to accept the most materialistic view of outer life with religious fervor. Even though Bolshevism is the most extreme consequence of the most materialistic view of the world and social life, it will, as it moves further into Asia, increasingly transform itself into something that is received there with the same religious zeal as was the spiritual world in former times. In the East, people will speak of the economic life in the same terminology once used to speak of the sacred Brahma. The fundamental disposition of the soul does not change; it endures, for it is not the content (of the soul) that matters here. The most materialistic views can be approached with the same fervor formerly used to grasp the most spiritual.

Let us now turn and look at the West. The West has given rise to the human soul's most recent development. It must be of special interest to us because it has brought forth the view which, rising like a mist, has since spread over the whole civilized world. It is the manner of conception that already found, its most significant expression in Francis Bacon and Hobbes; in minds of more recent times, in the economist Adam Smith, for example; among philosophers, in John Stuart Mill, and among historians, in Buckle, and so on.⁵⁵ It is a form of thinking that no longer contains any Imagination and Inspiration in its conceptions and ideas, where the human being is dependent on directing his conceptual life entirely outwards to the sense world, absorbing the impressions of the latter according to the associations of thoughts resulting from that same world. This came to its most brilliant philosophical expression in David Hume, also in other such as Locke.⁵⁶

There is something very strange here that must, however, be mentioned. When we focus on the West, we must pay heed to how minds like John Stuart Mill, for example, speak of human thought associations. The term “association of ideas” is in fact a completely Western thought form, but in Central Europe, for instance, it has been in such common use for more than half a century that people speak of it as if it had originated there. When psychology is taught in John Stuart Mill's sense, one says, for instance, that in the human soul, thoughts first connect themselves by means of one thought embracing another, or by one thought attaching itself to another, or by one permeating another. This implies that people look upon the thought world and view the individual thoughts as they would little spheres that relate themselves to each other (see drawing). To be consistent one would have to eliminate everything to do with the ego and astral body, inwardly referring only to a mere thought mechanism, something that a great number of people do, in fact, speak of. The soul of man is disemboweled, as it were. When you read a book by John Stuart Mill with its deductive and inductive logic, you feel as if you were mentally placed in a dissecting room where a number of animals hang that are having their innards taken out. Likewise, in the way Mill proceeds, one feels as if man's soul-spiritual being were disemboweled. He first empties the human being of everything within, leaving only the outer sheath. Then, thoughts do, indeed, appear only like so many associated atomistic formations that coalesce when we form an opinion. The tree is green. Here “green” is the one thought, “tree” is the other, and the two flow together. The inner being is no longer alive; it has been disemboweled and only the thought mechanism remains.

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This manner of conceiving of things is not derived from the sense world; it is imposed upon it. In my book, The Riddles of Philosophy,⁵⁷ I have drawn attention to how a mind such as John Stuart Mill's is in no way related to the inner world; it is simply given to behaving like a mere onlooker in whom the external world is reflected. Our concern here is that this method of thinking brings about what I have often described as the tragedy of materialism, which is that it no longer comprehends matter. For how can materialism fathom the nature of matter—and we have seen that, by going deeply into the human being, one penetrates into the true material element of the earth—if it first eliminates in thought what actually represents matter? In this regard, an extreme consequence already has been reached.

This extreme consequence could easily be traced today if it were not for the fact that people never look at the whole context of things, only at the details. Imagine where it must lead if all the actual inner flexible aspects of the ego are eliminated, if the human being is emptied of the very element that can enlighten him in the sense world concerning the spirit. Just think, where must this finally lead? It must result in the human being feeling that he no longer has anything of the actual content of the world. He looks outside at the sense world without realizing the truth of what we said yesterday, namely, that behind the external world of the senses there are spiritual beings. When he gives himself up to illusions, he assumes that atoms and molecules exist outside. He dreams of atoms and molecules. If man has no illusion concerning the external world, he can say nothing but that the whole outer world contains no truth, that it really is nothing. Inwardly, on the other hand, he has found nothing; he is empty. He must talk himself into believing that there is something inside him. He has no grasp of the spirit; therefore, he suggests spirit to himself, developing the suggestion of spirit. He is not capable of maintaining this suggestion without rigorously denying the reality of matter. This implies that he accommodates himself to a world view which does not perceive the spirit but only suggests it, merely persuading itself into the belief of spirit, while denying matter. You find the most extreme Western exponent of this in Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science⁵⁸ as the counterpart of what I described just now for the East. This was bound to arise as the final outcome of such conceptions as those of Locke, David Hume or John Stuart Mill. Christian Science as a concept is, however, also the final consequence of what has been brought about in recent times by the unfortunate division of man's soul life into knowledge and faith.

Once people start restricting themselves to knowledge on one side and faith on the other, a faith that no longer even tries to be knowledge, this leads in the end to their not having the spirit at all. Faith finally ceases to have a content. Then, people must suggest a content to themselves. They make no attempt to reach the genuine spirit through a spiritual science. In their search for the spirit, they arrive at Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science, this spirit which has come to expression there as the final consequence. The politics of the West have for some time been breathing this spirit. It does not sustain itself on realities; it lives on self-made suggestions. Naturally, when it is not a matter of an in-depth cure, one can even effect cures with Christian Science, as has been reported, and accounts are given of its marvelous cures. Likewise, all kinds of edifying results can be achieved with the West's politics of suggestion.

Yet, this Western concept possesses certain qualities, qualities of significance. We can best understand them when we contrast them with those of the East. On looking back to the ages when the Eastern qualities came especially to the fore, we find that they were those which, first of all, were capable of focusing the soul's eye on the prenatal life. They were therefore preeminently fitted to constitute what can represent the spiritual part, the spiritual world, in a social organism. Fundamentally speaking, all that we have created in Central Europe and the West is in a certain sense the legacy of the East. I have already mentioned this on another occasion. The East was particularly predisposed to cultivate the spiritual life. The West, on the other hand, is especially talented at developing thought forms. I have just described them in a somewhat unfavorable light. They can, however, be depicted in a favorable light as well, namely, if we consider all that has originated with Bacon of Verulam, Buckle, Mill, Thomas Reid, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Spencer, and others of like mind, for example, Bentham.⁵⁹ On the one hand, we admit that these thought forms are certainly not suited to penetrate into a spiritual world by means of Imagination and Inspiration, to comprehend the life before birth. Yet, on the other hand, we are obliged to say, particularly when one studies how this manner of thinking has pervaded and lives in our Western science, that all this is especially appropriate for economic thinking; and one day, when the economic life of the social organism will have to be developed, we shall have to become students of Western thought, of Thomas Reid, John Stuart Mill, Buckle, Adam Smith, and the rest. They have only made the mistake of applying their form of thinking to science, to epistemology, and the spiritual life. This thinking is in order when we train ourselves by means of it and reflect on how to form associations, how best to manage the economy. Mill should not have written a book on logic; the spiritual capacity he applied to doing this should have been used for describing in detail the configuration of a given industrial association. We must realize that when anyone today wishes to produce a book such as my Towards Social Renewal, it is necessary for him to have learned to understand in what manner one attains to the spiritual sphere in the Oriental sense, and in what manner—although following a much more erratic path—one arrives at economic thinking in the West. For both directions belong together and are necessary to one another.

As far as a view of life is concerned, this Western thinking then does lead to pseudo-sciences like the one by Mrs. Eddy, her Christian Science. We must not, however, look at matters according to what they cannot be, but consider what they can be. For unity must come about through the cooperation of all human beings on earth, not by some abstract, theoretical structure of ideas that is simply laid down, and then viewed as a unity.

At this point, one may ask from where in the human organization this particular thinking of Mill, Buckle, and Adam Smith originates. We find that Oriental thinking has basically arisen from a contact with the world, especially when looking back to the more ancient forms of Oriental philosophy. It is a thinking, a feeling, which gives the impression that, out of the earth itself, the roots of a tree grow and produce leaves. In just this way, the ancient Indian, for example, seems to us to be united with the whole earth; his thoughts appear to us to have grown out of earthly existence in a spiritual manner, just as a tree's leaves and blossoms appear to have grown out of it by means of all the forces of the earth.

It is precisely this attachment to the external world in the Oriental person, the absorption of the spirituality, that I have referred to as lying beyond the sense world. In the West, everything is brought out of the instincts, the depth of the personality—I might say, from man's metabolic system, not the external world. For the Oriental, the world works upon both his senses and Spirit, kindling within him what he calls his holy Brahma. In the West, we have what arises from the body's metabolism and leads to associations of ideas; it is something that is particularly suited to characterize the economic life, something that does not apply until the next earth incarnation. For, with the exception of the head, what we bear as our physical organism is something that does not find its true expression, as we have outlined, until the following life on earth. We have been given our head from our previous earth life; our limbs and our metabolic system are Borne by us into the next earthly incarnation. This is a metamorphosis from one life on earth to the next. Hence, in the West, people think with something that only becomes mature in the following earth life. For this reason, Western thinking is particularly predisposed to focus on the life after death, to speak of immortality, not of eternity, not to know the term, “unbornness,” but only the word, “immortality.” It is the West which represents life after death as something that the human being should above all else be concerned about. Yet, even now, something I might call radical, but in a radical sense something noble, is preparing itself in the West out of the totally materialistic culture. One with the faculty to look a little more deeply into what is thus trying to evolve makes a strange discovery. Although people strive in the most intimate way for life after death, for some kind of immortality, hence, for an egotistic life after death, they strive in such a manner that, out of this effort, something special will develop. While a large part of humanity still harbors an illusion in this regard, something quite remarkable is, oddly enough, developing in the West. Since individual elements of the ideas concerning life after death being developed by the West are reflected to a certain extent in a great majority of Europeans, they, too, have especially perfected this preoccupation with the postmortem life. The European, however, would prefer to say, “Well, my religion promises me a life after death, but in this transitory, unsatisfactory, merely material earth life I need make no effort to secure the immortality of my soul. Christ died to make me immortal; I need not strive for immortality. It is mine once and for all; Christ makes me immortal.”—or something to that effect.

In the West, particularly in America, something different is preparing itself. Out of the most diverse, occasionally the most bizarre and trivial religious world conceptions, we see something trying to arise which, although it has quite materialistic forms, is nevertheless connected with. something that will be a part of life in the future, particularly in regard to this world-view of immortality. Among certain sects in America, the belief is prevalent that one cannot survive at all after death if one has made no effort in this earthly life, if one has not accomplished something whereby one acquires this life after death. A judgment concerning good and evil is envisioned after death that does not merely follow the pattern of earthly truth. He who makes no effort here on earth to bear through the portals of death what he has developed in his soul will be diffused and scattered in the cosmic all. What a person wishes to carry with him through death must be developed here. A man dies the second death of the soul—to use the saying of Paul—who does not provide here for his soul to become immortal. This is something that is definitely developing in the West as a world concept in place of the leisurely, passive, awaiting what will happen after death. It is something that is emerging in certain American sects. Perhaps today it is still little noticed, but there is a great deal of feeling in favor of viewing life here in a moral sense, and to arrange the conduct of life in such a manner that by means of what one does here, something is carried through the gate of death.

As I said, in the East, the particular attention to the life before birth developed long ago. This made it possible for life on earth to be viewed as a continuation of this prenatal, supersensory life in the spirit. Earthly life thus received its content, not out of itself, but out of the spiritual life. In the West, an attitude is developing today for the future that will have nothing to do with a passive, indifferent life of waiting here for death because the life beyond is guaranteed; instead, the knowledge is growing that man carries nothing through the portal of death unless care is taken on earth to make something out of what one already has here.

Thus, Western thinking is adapted, on the one hand, to organizing economic matters within the social organism; on the other hand, it is suited to develop further the one-sided doctrine of life after death. This is why spiritualism has had a special opportunity for developing in the West, and from there, could invade the rest of the world. After all, spiritualism was only devised to give a sort of guarantee of immortality to those who could no longer attain to any conviction concerning immortality by means of any kind of inner development. For, in most instances, a person actually becomes a spiritualist in order to receive by some means or the other the certain guarantee that he is immortal ,after death.

Between these two worlds lies something that is implied in Fichte's words, “The external world is the substance of my duty become visible.” As I said before, people really have no understanding for this mode of thinking, and what is written today about Fichte could well be compared to what a blind man might say about color. Particularly in the last few years, a tremendous amount of talking and lecturing has been done about this saying by Fichte, but it was all accomplished in such a way that one is disposed to say that Fichte, that out-and-out Central European mind, has really been americanized by the German newspapers and writers of literature. One is confronted with americanized versions of Fichte. There, we find the nuance of human soul life which, in a special way, is supposed to develop the middle member of the social organism, the one that arises from the relationship of man to man. It would be of benefit if some of you would for once make an in-depth study—it isn't easy—of one of Fichte's writings where he speaks as though nature did not exist at all. Duty, for example, and everything else is deduced by first proving that external human beings actually exist in whom the materialized substance of duty can become reality. Here, all the raw material is contained, so to speak, from which the rights and state organism of the threefold social order have to be put together.

What, then, is the actual cause of the catastrophic events in the past few years? The basic reason is that there was no living perception, no feeling, for such matters. Berlin's policies are American. This is fine for America, but it is not suitable for Berlin. This is why Berlin's politics amount to nothing. For, just imagine, since American policies were constantly carried out in Berlin or Vienna, we could just as well have called Berlin, New York, apart from the difference in language, and Vienna, Chicago for all the difference there would have been otherwise. When, in Central Europe, something is done that is completely foreign to it, something originating in the West where it has its rightful place, then the primal essence of the folk spirit is aroused and gives it the lie without the people being aware of it. This was basically the case in recent decades. This was the underlying phenomenon of what happened, the phenomenon that consists, for instance, in the fact that people have trampled Goethe's thinking underfoot, and as another example, have read Ralph Waldo Trine⁶⁰ out of a sort of instinct. Actually, all our aristocratic dandies in politics have shown an interest in Trine, and received their special inner stimulus or whatever from that direction. When affairs came to the boiling point, they even turned to Woodrow Wilson;⁶¹ and he⁶² who would now again like to be President of the German Republic still has that frame of mind that allows his brain automatically to roll out Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Thus, in recent times, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, we experienced how a formerly truly representative German personality spouted forth americanisms. This is the best and most immediate example of how matters really stand at present. Indeed, we must be able to see through these archetypal phenomena if we wish to understand what is actually happening today. If we merely pick up a newspaper and read Prince Max von Baden's speeches, simply studying them out of context, then this is something absolutely worthless today. It is a mere kaleidoscope of words. Only when we are able to place such things into the whole context of the world can we hope to understand anything about the world. No progress can be made until people realize how necessary it is today that world understanding be acquired if one wishes to have a say. The most characteristic sign of the time is the belief that when a group of individuals have set up some trashy proposition as a general program—such as the unity of all men regardless of race, nation or color, and so forth—something has been accomplished. Nothing has been accomplished except to throw sand into people's eyes. Something real is attained only when we note the differences and realize what world conditions are. Formerly, human beings could live in accordance with their instincts. This is no longer possible; they must learn to live consciously. This can be done only by looking deeply into what is actually happening.

The East was supreme in regard to life before birth and repeated earthly lives that are connected with it. The greatness of the West consisted in its disposition in regard to life after death. Here, in the middle (see drawing an next page), the actual science of history has originated, although today it is as yet misunderstood. Take Hegel⁶³ as an example. In Hegel's works, we have neither preexistence nor postexistence; there is neither life before birth nor after death, but there is a spirited grasp of history. Hegel begins with logic, goes from there to a philosophy of nature, develops his doctrine of the soul, then that of the state, and ends with the triad of art, religion and science. They are his world content. There is no mention of preexistence or an immortal soul, only of the spirit that lives here in this world.

Preexistence, postexistence—this is really life in the present state of mankind, the permeation of history. Read what has been drawn up particularly by Hegel as a philosophy of history. In libraries, one generally finds the pages of his books still uncut! Not many editions have appeared of Hegel's works. In the eighties of the last century, Eduard von Hartmann⁶⁴ wrote that in all of Germany, where twenty universities exist that have faculties of philosophy, no more than two of the instructors had read Hegel! What he said could not be refuted; it was true. Nonetheless, it hardly needs to be said that all the students were ready to swear to what they had been told about Hegel by professors who had never read him. Do familiarize yourselves with his work and you will find that here, in fact, historical conception has come about, the experience of what goes on between human beings. There you also find the material from which the state, the rights sphere of the threefold social organism, has to be created. We can learn about the constitution of the spiritual organism from the Orient; the constitution of the economic sphere is to be learned from the West.

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In this way, we have to look into the differentiations of humanity all over the whole earth, and can gain an understanding of the matter from one side or the other. If the goal is approached directly, namely, if the social life is studied, one arrives at the threefold order as developed in my book, Towards Social Renewal. By thus studying the life of mankind throughout the earth, we come to the realization that there is one part with a special disposition for the economy; there is another with a special aptitude for organizing the state; and yet another with a specific inclination towards the spiritual life. A threefold structure can then be created by taking the actual economy from the West, the state from the Middle, and from the East—naturally in a renewed form, as I have often said—the spiritual life. Here you have the state, here the economic life and here the spiritual life (see above sketch); the two others have to be taken across from here. In this way, all humanity has to work together, for the origins of these three members of the social organism are found in different regions of the earth, and therefore must be kept properly apart everywhere. If, in the old manner, human beings wish to mix up in a unified state what is striving to be threefold, nothing will result from it except that in the West the state will be a unity where the economic life overwhelms the whole, and everything else is only submerged into it. If the theorists then take hold of and study the matter, meaning, if Karl Marx moves from Germany to London, he then concludes that everything depends on the economic life. If Marx's insanity triumphs, the three spheres are reduced to one, the one being of a purely economic character. If one limits oneself to what wishes to be merely the state or rights configuration, one apes the economic life of the West, which for decades has been fashioning an illusory structure, which then naturally collapses when a catastrophe occurs—something that has indeed happened!

The Orient, which possesses the spiritual life in a weakened state in the first place, simply has adopted the economic life from the West and has inoculated itself with something that is completely alien to it. When these matters are studied, we shall see particularly that blessings can only fall upon the earth when, everywhere, one gathers together into the threefold social organism through human activity what by its very nature develops in the various regions.

• 53. Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Appellation an das Publikum ueber die ihm beigemessenen atheistischen Aeusserungen, 1799.
• 54. Rabindranath Tagore: 1861–1941, Indian poet and religious philosopher.
• 55. Francis Bacon: 1561–1626, English philosopher and statesman, founder of empiricism; Thomas Hobbes: 1588–1679, English philosopher; Adam Smith: 1723–1790, English philosopher and sociologist; John Stuart Mill: 1806–1873, English philosopher and political economist, one of the founders of positivism; Henry Thomas Buckle: 1821–1862, English writer on social history.
• 56. David Hume: 1711–1776, English philosopher and statesman; John Locke: 1632–1704, English philosopher.
• 57. Rudolf Steiner: The Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
• 58. Mary Baker Eddy: 1821–1910, founder of Christian Science.
• 59. Herbert Spencer: 1820–1903, English philosopher; Jeremy Bentham: 1748–1832, English Jurist, founder of philosophy of utilitarianism.
• 60. Ralph Waldo Trine: 1866–1958, American author.
• 61. Woodrow Wilson: 1856–1924, president of the USA from 1913 until 1921. In an address to Congress on January 8, 1918, he outlined a “Program of World Peace,” condensed in fourteen points.
• 62. Prinz Max von Baden: 1866–1929, became German chancellor in the fall of 1918; on October 5, 1918, he directed a peace offer to President Wilson based on the latter's “Fourteen Points.”
• 63. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: 1770–1831; complete edition of Hegel's works, Berlin, 1832–1844.
• 64. Eduard von Hartmann, 1842–1906.

I would like to sum up once more what I said yesterday concerning the differences of the soul constitutions among the various nations and of human beings generally all over the world. I have indicated that various predispositions and soul qualities exist among people in different parts of the earth. Thus, the population of each region on earth can contribute to what all humanity accomplishes in regard to the whole of civilization. Yesterday we had to point out that the Oriental nations and all the people of Asia are especially predisposed by their nature to develop that element which makes its contribution to the spiritual life of the social organism. Oriental people are especially gifted for everything pertaining primarily to the spiritual development in mankind, hence to knowledge and formulation of the super-sensible realm. This is connected with the fact that Oriental people are particularly inclined to develop concepts and ideas on how the human being has descended into this earthly existence from spiritual worlds, in which he has lived since his last death until this birth. The realization or the doctrine of preexistence, which is based on the fact that the human being has undergone a spirit existence before entering into a physical body here, is a principal aspect of these Oriental predispositions. There is therefore also the capability of comprehending repeated earth lives. It is possible for a person to adhere to the view that life goes on after death, continuing on forever without his returning to the earth. It is not logically possible, however, to hold the view that life on earth is a continuation of a spiritual existence without also being obliged to take for granted the thought that this life must repeat itself. Thus, the Oriental was particularly predisposed to understand that he dwelt in spiritual worlds prior to this earth life, that in a sense he received the impulses for this life on earth from the divine spiritual world.

This is connected with the whole way in which the Oriental arrived at his knowledge, his whole soul constitution. I have already indicated this to some of you. Now there are a number of other friends present here, and I would like to characterize something once more that I have already outlined for some of you.

We know that man is a threefold being, that he is divided into the nerves-and-senses man, the rhythmic man—who includes the activities expressed in breathing, blood circulation, and so on—and the third, the metabolic man, everything that has to do with man's metabolism. Now these three members of the human organization do not come to expression in the same manner everywhere on earth; they are expressed in different ways in different parts of the world.

Speaking of the East, all this is in decadence in a sense; it is suppressed and slumbers today in the Oriental human being. We are not concerned now with his present soul condition. Instead, we must become principally acquainted with a soul state that he possessed in a distant past. For the very reason that this soul condition has diminished, Asia humanity is about to adopt Bolshevism with the same religious fervor and devotion with which it formerly received the teaching of the holy Brahman—something that Europeans and Americans will become aware of before very long to their horror. Which of the three members of human nature came to special expression in the Oriental? It was the metabolic man. It was particularly the ancient Oriental who dwelt completely in the metabolism. This will not appear a repulsive view to anyone who does not conceive of substance in terms of lumps of matter, but who knows that spirit lives in all matter. The lofty, admirable spirituality of Orientals was brought about by what rose out of their metabolic process, and radiated into consciousness. What occurs in the human metabolism is, of course, intimately related with what the external sense world is. From the latter, we receive what then turns into matter within us. We know that behind this outer sense world there is spirit. In reality, we consume spirit and the consumed spirit becomes matter first within us. Yet, what we consume in this manner produced spirit in the Oriental even after it had been consumed. Thus, a person who understands these things views the remarkable poetic achievements of the Vedas, the greatness of the Bhagavad Gita, the profound philosophy of the Vedas and Vedanta and the Indian philosophy of Yoga without admiring them any less—because he knows that they have emerged from the inner process as a product of metabolism, just like the blossoms of a tree are the result of its metabolism. Just as we look at the tree and see in its blossoms what the earth pushes toward air and light, so we view what human beings in ancient India produced in the Vedas, in the Vedanta and Yoga philosophies, as a blossom of earthly existence itself. What we see as a product of the earth in tree blossoms is, in a way, offered up to air and light. Nevertheless, it is a product of the earth in the same sense as are wheat and grain growing in the fields, and fruits an trees, which are then cooked, enjoyed and digested by the human being. Within the special nature of the ancient Indian, this—instead of turning into plant blossoms and fruits—became the marvelous formulations of the Vedas, the Vedanta and Yoga philosophies. One who must view the ancient Indian as one would a tree. Both are examples of what the earth is capable of producing in its metabolism—in a tree, through its roots and sap, in man through his nourishment. Thus, one learns to recognize the divine in something that the spiritualist scorns, because he finds matter to be of such a low order.

Moreover, the ancient Indian had an ideal. It was his ideal to go beyond this metabolic experience to the higher member of human nature, namely, the rhythmic system. This is why he did his Yoga exercises, his special breathing exercises, practicing them consciously. What the metabolism brought forth from him as a spiritual blossom of earth evolution came about unconsciously. What he did consciously was to bring his rhythmic system, the system of breathing and blood, into a regulated, systematic movement. What did he do by thus advancing himself, for this was his specific form of advancement. What did he accomplish? What happened in this rhythmic system? We inhale the air from outside; we give to this air something that comes from the human metabolism, namely, carbon. Within us, a metabolic process takes place between something that is a result of our metabolism and something contained in the air that we breathe in. Today's materialistic, physical world-view finds nitrogen and oxygen—ignorant of the true nature of both—mixed together in the air and considers it something purely material. The ancient Indian perceived the air as the process which occurs when the element derived from the metabolism unites in the human being with what is inhaled and is then absorbed. When he fulfilled his ideal inherent in Yoga philosophy, the ancient Indian perceived in the blood circulation the mysteries of the air, that is, what exists spiritually in the air. Through Yoga philosophy he became acquainted with what is spiritual in the air. What does one learn to know there? One comes to recognize what has come into us, insofar as we have become beings that breathe. We learn to perceive what entered into us when we descended from spiritual worlds into this physical body. Knowledge of preexistence, of life before birth, is then cultivated. Therefore, it was in a sense the secret of those who practiced Yoga to penetrate the mystery of life before birth.

We see that the ancient Indian dwelt within his metabolism, notwithstanding the fact that he produced much that was beautiful, grandiose, and powerful, and he artificially raised himself to the rhythmic system. All this has, however, fallen into decadence. Today, all this sleeps in Asia. It only makes itself felt nebulously in abstract forms in asiatic souls when enlightened spirits, such as Rabindranath Tagore, speak of and revel in the ideal of the Asians.

Going from Asia to Central Europe, we find that the European, provided that he really is one, can be characterized as in Fichte's statement which I pointed out to you yesterday: “The external material world is the substance of my duty become visible; on its own, it has no existence. It is there only so that I might have something with which to fulfill my duty.” The human being who lived and lives in the central regions of the earth on this basis, dwells in the rhythmic system, just as the ancient Indian lived in the metabolic system. One remains unconscious of the element in which one lives. The Indian still strove upward to the rhythmic system as to an ideal, and he became aware of it. The Central European lives in the rhythmic system and is not conscious of it. Dwelling in this way in the rhythmic system, he brings about all that belongs to the legal, democratic governmental element in the social organization. He forms it in a one-sided way, but he forms it in the sense I indicated yesterday, because he is especially talented in shaping matters dealing with relationships between people, and between a person and his environment. Yet he, in turn, also has an ideal. He has the ideal to rise to the next level, to the man of nerves and senses. Just as the Indian considered Yoga philosophy to be his ideal, the artistic breathing that leads to insight in a special manner, so the Central European considers it his ideal to lift himself up to conceptions that come from the being of nerves and senses, to conceptions that are pure ideas, attained through an inner elevation, just as the Indian by advancing himself attained to the Yoga philosophy.

Therefore, it is necessary to realize that if one really wishes to understand individuals who have worked from such a basis as did Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Goethe, one must understand them in the same way an Indian understood his Yoga initiates. This special soul disposition, however, tones down the real spirituality. One still gets a clear awareness of it, for instance, in the way Hegel takes ideas as realities. Hegel, Fichte and Goethe possessed this clear awareness that ideas are truths, realities. One even comes to something like Fichte says: “The external sense world has no existence of its own; it is only the visible substance of my duty.” But one does not reach the fulfillment of ideas which the Oriental had. One can reach the point of saying, as did Hegel: “History begins, history lives. That is the living movement of ideas.” Yet one limits oneself only to this external reality. One views this external reality as spirit, as idea. Yet, particularly if one is in Hegel's place, one can speak neither of immortality nor of unbornness. Hegelean philosophy begins with logic; this means that it starts with what the human being thinks of as finite; then it extends over a certain philosophy of nature. It has a psychology, however, that deals only with the earthly soul. It also has a theory of government. Finally, it rises to its highest point when it reaches the threefold aspect of art, science and religion. Yet it goes no further; it does not enter into the spiritual worlds. In the most spiritual way, men like Hegel and Fichte have described what exists in the external world; but anything that would look beyond the outer world is suppressed. Thus we see that the very element that has no counterpart in the spiritual world, namely, the life of rights, of the state, something that is entirely of this world, makes up the greatness of the thought structures that appear here. One looks at the external world as spirit but is unable to go beyond it. Yet, in the process one trains the mind, teaching it a certain discipline. Then, if one values a certain inner development, this can be accomplished, because, by schooling oneself through what can be achieved in this area by occupying the mind with the realm of ideas, one is in a sense inwardly propelled into the spiritual world. This is indeed remarkable.

I must admit to you that whenever I read writings by the Scholastics, they evoke a feeling in me that induces me to say that they can think; they know how to live in thoughts. In a certain other way, directed more to the earthly sphere, I have to say the same of Hegel, Fichte or Schelling. They know how to live in thoughts. Even in the decadent way in which Scholasticism appears in Neo-Scholasticism, I find a much more developed life of thought than is found, for example, in modern science, popular books, or journalism. There, all thinking has already evaporated and disappeared. It is simply true that the better Scholastic minds, in the present time, for example, think in more precise concepts than do our university professors of philosophy. It is somewhat surprising that when one allows these thoughts to work upon oneself, for example, when reading a Scholastic book, even a truly Scholastic-Catholic text, and allows it to affect one, using it in a sense as a kind of self-education, one's soul is driven beyond itself. Such a book works like a meditation. Through its effect, one arrives at something different that brings about enlightenment. Here, we confront a very strange fact.

Consider that if such modern Dominicans, Jesuits and priests of other orders, who immerse themselves in what remains of Scholasticism, would permit the educational effect of Scholastic thought forms to work upon them all the way, they would all come through this discipline in a relatively easy manner to a comprehension of spiritual science. If one would allow those who study Neo-Scholasticism to follow their own soul development, it would not be long before those priests of Catholic orders in particular would become adherents of spiritual science. What had to be done so that this would not happen? They were given a dogma that curtails such study, and does not allow what would develop out of the soul to come about. Even today, someone wishing to develop towards spiritual science could be given as a meditation text the Scholastic book written by a contemporary Jesuit that I once showed here.⁶⁵ Yet, as I told you, it bears the imprimatur of a certain archbishop. The enlightenment that would occur in a person, if he were completely free to devote himself to it, has been cut off.

We must be able to see through these things. For then we will realize how important it is for certain circles to prevent by all means the consequences of what would develop if free reign were given the effects of these matters in the souls. The Central European striving is, after all, aimed at lifting oneself out of the rhythmic man, where one dwells as a matter of fact, to the nerves-and-senses man, who possesses what he attains for himself in the ideal sphere. For these people, there is a special predisposition to understand earthly life as something spiritual. Hegel did this in the most all-encompassing sense.

Let us now go to Western man. Yesterday, I said that Western man, particularly as exemplified by the most brilliant minds as early as Bacon and others, followed by Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Spencer, Buckle, Thomas Reid, and the economist Adam Smith, has a special predisposition to develop the kind of thinking which can then be utilized in the economic part of the social organism.

If we consider Spencer's philosophy, for instance, we realize that this is a kind of thinking which stems completely from the nerves-and-senses man, that in all respects it is a product of the senses and nerves. It would be most appropriate for creating industrial organizations and associations. It is only out of place.when employed by Spencer for philosophy. If he had used this same thinking to set up factories and social organizations, it would have been applied in its rightful place. It was out of place when he used it for philosophy.

This comes from the fact that Western man no longer lives in the rhythmic system, but has taken a step upward, living as a matter of course in the human nerves-and-senses system. It is the nature of the Oriental to live in his metabolic system. It is the Central European's nature to live in the rhythmic system. It is Western man's nature to live in the nerves-and-senses system (see drawing). The Oriental lives in the metabolism; he strives upward, trying to attain to the rhythmic system. The Central European lives in the rhythmic system. He strives towards the nerves-and-senses system. Western man already lives in the latter. Where does he wish to ascend? He is not yet there, but he has the impulse to strive upwards beyond himself. It appears at first in a caricatured form, which I characterized for you yesterday as the denial of matter and the autosuggestion of the human being in Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science. Despite the fact that this is as yet a caricature, it is nevertheless a forerunner of what Western man must aim for. The aim must be something superhuman, by which I do not mean to imply that anyone who, instead of striving beyond the nerve-sense system, strives down into unconsciousness, and such as that, would thereby become superhuman.

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Yesterday, I concluded by saying that it is in this way that the human faculties are distributed over the world's various regions, and it is necessary for real cooperation to come about. We are in a position today where, in regard to civilization, we are completely dependent on the nerves-and senses being of the West. I made use of a paradox, but this paradox quite clearly expresses the reality of the situation. The thoughts in Vienna and in Berlin are not the thoughts that arose from the folk spirit and then culminated in Fichte or Hegel. The spirits of Fichte and Hegel have been buried. What is written today in books and newspapers in Central Europe, in Vienna or Berlin, are not Fichte's thought forms; it is a lie when people quote Fichte today. Rather, the truth is that what reaches the public in Berlin or Vienna today is more closely related to what is being thought in Chicago or New York than to what was thought by Fichte or Hegel.

What had to happen, however, was that these three members, of which this one (in the East) was, to begin with, especially predisposed to the spiritual life, brought across the spiritual life as a tradition of its original, elementary form once existing in the Orient. There in the East the human being lived as fully within the life of the spirit itself as today he is firmly anchored here in Europe in physical life. Only the shadowy reflection of this spiritual life is found in Central Europe, and only its tradition in Western Europe. Western Europe is characterized by its own predisposition to the postmortem life, the life which is envisioned after death. I told you yesterday that in America an awareness is already in the process of developing, if only in a few sects, that man must not merely be passive about his soul life here on earth if he is to carry something through death and live on in spiritual worlds. He must acquire here through his work and actions what he wishes to carry through the gate of death. The awareness exists that the human being disintegrates if he does not provide for his immortality here, if, on earth, he does not develop a sense for ideals. This is already emerging in some Western sects, even though this ideal still appears in a distorted form.

That which is the life of the state on the other hand was striven for by what existed in the rhythmic system and could be borne upward into thoughts. This has come into evidence especially in the man of the middle (the Central European). From there, it affected the West. We are dealing with an odd phenomenon here that is only understood when one looks at its inner aspect. Strange as it may seem, something was astir in Central Europe. It goes without saying that in the rhythmic system the inclination remained for a communal human life, for a social life together in freedom. This impulse remained, to start with, deep in the unconscious realm (see drawing below). It is true, however, that impulses are present among human beings even if people are not conscious of them. Let us say, therefore, that something definite lived, to begin with unconsciously, in Central Europe in the eighteenth century; it could not rise into consciousness, but its effects were transmitted to the West. Having been received there, but not having developed inwardly as a matter of course, it turned into passion and feeling, thus into the French Revolution.

Schiller had thoughts on this. Here (referring to the drawing on page 12), we have the French Revolution. There is even a symbolic event attesting to the fact that Schiller pondered on what actually happened there. You know that he had the honor of being made a French citizen. He therefore pondered on it all, but to begin with, it all lived in his rhythmic system. Then, through his own insight, he lifted it up into consciousness and wrote his letters concerning the aesthetic education of man.

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You find in these letters what one could say at that time about people living together in a truly free state. Hume then merely took this concept of the state, which Schiller had lifted up into consciousness in his Aesthetic Letters, and somewhat pedantically fashioned it into a system. There is something extraordinarily important in what Schiller brought out from the depths of the folk spirit in these letters on aesthetic education. Because it was something so profound, it was subsequently not comprehended when the element of the nerves-and-senses man became dominant everywhere.

I have often referred to a lonely man, living in Vienna, by the name of Heinrich Deinhardt.⁶⁶ Heinrich Marianus Deinhardt: 1821–1879, “Beitraege zur Wuerdigung Schillers. Briefe ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen.” Published by G. Wachsmuth, Stuttgart, 1922. He wrote letters upon letters about this aesthetic education of the human being, most ingenious letters. This man had the misfortune of breaking a leg as the result of a fall in the street. The leg was set, but, being undernourished, Deinhardt could not recover and died from breaking a bone. That is to say, he who already in the second half of the nineteenth century had so conscientiously interpreted Schiller's Aesthetic Letters died of malnutrition. And Deinhardt's letters on Schiller's aesthetic education of man are completely forgotten!

Again, these Aesthetic Letters by Schiller would be a good preparation for purifying and uplifting the soul so as to gain a spiritual view of the world. Schiller himself was not yet able to do this. It is always effective, however, if another person engaged in soul development takes up something originating from the one who as yet does not reach up into the spiritual world. It then has the effect of letting him see into the spiritual world. To be sure, people in Europe have revered as special remedies for the soul Ralph Waldo Trine, Marden⁶⁷ and similar superficial minds instead of Schiller, forgetting the other views that would actually lead upward into the spiritual world.

It is indeed necessary that these matters be grasped and comprehended in the whole context of life and world conditions. People have to realize how differentiated human capabilities are all over the earth. And the following must be pointed out. Up to now, no effort has been spared to publicize Schiller's riotous early works, The Robbers, Fiesco, or Intrigue and Love. People become most enthusiastic about the sentimentalities of Mary Stuart, the very profitable dramatic scenes of Maid of Orleans or the Bride of Messina. Today, Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, in which he surpasses himself in significance for all humanity—his Robbers, the whole of Mary Stuart and Wallenstein notwithstanding should not only be taken up and studied, one should allow them to affect one. For today, it is up to us not just to indulge in the empty talk of philistine academics existing in regard to our classical writers such as Goethe and Schiller, but above all else to take our own stand and on our own to discover what was great about them. We go on repeating what philistine academia has said for over a century about Wallenstein, Mary Stuart, and so forth. Our task today is to grasp such greatness ourselves in a fundamental way, for only then can humanity progress. So, here too, we discover the necessity for a transformation, a renewal. Even what people in our schools read and hear about Mary Stuart, Wallenstein, The Robbers, and so forth, must be revised. In this critical age we need a complete renewal, for the times are critical indeed.

If we look over to the West, we see that with all that it can produce as the expression of mankind through the nerves-and-senses system, this West is asking for the ascent into what lies beyond human knowledge in the spiritual world. I told you yesterday that in order for the cultural life, the life of the state and the economic life to be able to assert themselves in the threefold social organism, they must work together. These three elements must work together. Let us not merely say, “Ex Oriente lux!” We can turn to the Orient, study the Bhagavad Gita, Yoga philosophy and the Vedas; we can grind away at these subjects just as we have become accustomed to grind away at others in Europe. We can start grinding away at Oriental philosophy after the other subjects have become boring to us. But we shall make no progress this way, for what was once right for the earth will not again be appropriate for the present and Future; it will remain something of the past. We can admire it as something that was once right for the earth; we cannot, however, simply adopt it again in a passive manner as does the Theosophical Society, for instance. Likewise, we cannot just carry over what has been handed down to us of the European past in the old tradition. We cannot say that what is contained in the national characteristics of the Orient, of Middle Europe, can simply be renewed by us. Rather, we must ask, if we wish to achieve a realistic union of these three elements that are inherent dispositions of human nature, how can we do that? We can only do it when we realize in what way the nerves-and-senses life, which has, after all, taken hold of all of us, must pass beyond itself. It means that we must rise to something different that can come neither from the East, the Middle nor the West. It can only come through the new initiation, through the new spiritual science. It is brought about by our ascending from the most current form of thinking, trained by natural science and the nerves-and-senses being, to the science of the new initiation; acquiring from this new initiation the ways and means for bringing about cooperation between what was once the nature of the ancient Orient, later that of the Middle and now that of the West. We need a new science of initiation that can bring about a unity of these three, a living unity. In this modern age, we will not arrive at a cultural life if we do not strive for this new initiation science. We will have no proper politics, no life of the state, if we just continue in the same old way, if we do not turn to those scientific branches born of the new initiation and inquire how the politics of the future must be shaped. Neither will we achieve a new economic life, if we do not understand that form of thinking which should be applied neither to philosophy as did Spencer, nor to the life of the state as did Adam Smith, but only to the organization of the economic life. Then, however, we must also know how to integrate the latter into the two other systems. For that we need the science of initiation. We cannot progress if we cannot say to ourselves: From a comprehension of what was once the Oriental disposition, we come to the essence of the cultural, the spiritual life. By truly comprehending the disposition of the human being of the Middle, we reach the point of really understanding the nature of the life of rights, of the state. By understanding the Western nature, we gain a comprehension of what the economic life is. The three fall apart, however, if we cannot unite them in a higher unity. And we can only accomplish that when we view the three from the perspective resulting for us from the new Mysteries, which are here called the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

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These matters must be understood, for whoever has insight into them knows that all the aspirations coming to expression today are leading towards ruin. People simply do not reckon with the most important factors. Take the most radical socialists. Subjectively they may have honorable intentions for humanity, but they only count an forces of decline. They strike a wrong balance of life. We only take stock the right way when, out of spiritual science, we do not just grasp at anything arbitrarily put there, saying that this is the way it must be if humanity is to be happy, but when we ask ourselves: What will come into being when the cultural life, the life of rights and the economic life are brought into the right relationship with each other; what kind of social organism results from that? Then, such a social body will also contain its permeation with spirit. This implies the presence of a realistic economic life, not one that people dream and fantasize about, but one that can originate as the best possible one. Again, its political system will be the best possible; a cultural life will be present that will unite the prenatal life with that after death. Such a cultural life will see in the human being, dwelling here in this physical world, a being orienting himself according to his rights; a being into whom, in the cultural sphere, shines his prenatal life; a being who in the economic life cannot attain to an ideal, only to the best possible one, yet is able through initiation science in his will to transform the faculties active in the economic sphere so that they allow the life after death to shine forth. Because this is the case, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not just one theory among many, not something that takes its place as a party or sectarian program alongside others. Anthroposophy is something that is brought forth out of the knowledge that can be acquired when garth's and mankind's evolution are comprehended in their working together and in their totality.

In the present time, we have to admit that any other relationship to the world or to temporal reforms will lead to nothing, for what can bring progress to mankind must emerge out of the new initiation science.

Today, this must be expressed again and again in many different ways. It has been incorporated into this building; it is expressed in all the details of this structure. Looking even at its smallest segment, it can tell you about what is intended here, what is expressed in words in a variety of ways. This is what gives the whole matter here a certain uniform character. At the same time, a will comes to expression here that is intimately connected with the forces of ascent, not the declining forces of evolving humanity, something one could wish people would understand. This is what we should like to work for more and more. This is what we now wish to aim for by means of the courses⁶⁸ that will be given here this fall, in which we intend to show that the knowledge derived from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can work in a truly fructifying manner into the individual branches of science. Then, the day will perhaps come when people will understand what is really intended here, when sufficient comprehension will exist in the world so that we can reach the point at some future date when this building, still enshrouded in mist, can be opened up. For, as long as this building cannot be opened up, there still exists something that shows a lack of understanding for what is intended here.
I shall continue with this next Friday at eight o'clock.

At eight tomorrow, our friend, Count Polzer,⁶⁹ will lecture on European politics of the last century in connection with the testament of Peter the Great. This is an interesting subject about which, hopefully, a discussion will ensue. On Friday, I shall continue with the questions, already presented, and their application to the individual human being. On Saturday, at eight o'clock, I will continue with those particular questions that relate to religious problems. Sunday at six-thirty will be the next eurythmy performance, followed by a lecture.

• 65. Reference to Alfons Lehmen, SJ: 1847–1910, and his book Lehrbuch der Philosophie auf aristotelisch-scholastischer Grundlage, Vol. I, Freiburg i. Br., 1917. Compare with this the lecture of July 10, 1920, reprinted in “Blaetter fuer Anthroposophie,” September, 1953. Not translated.
• 66. Heinrich Marianus Deinhardt: 1821–1879, “Beitraege zur Wuerdigung Schillers. Briefe ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen.” Published by G. Wachsmuth, Stuttgart, 1922.
• 67. Orison Swett Marden: 1850–1924, American author.
• 68. Reference to the first Course of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum from September 26 until October 16, 1920.
• 69. Ludwig Graf von Polzer-Hoditz: 1869–1945; his lecture was later published under the title, “Der Kampf gegen den Geist und das Testament Peters des Grossen,” Stuttgart, 1922.

A hundred-fifty years ago today Hegel was born in Stuttgart, and when we recall this fact today, we should be spontaneously filled with a feeling for the tremendous change and transformation the times have undergone since the birth of this individual whose spirit was so extraordinarily characteristic of the whole of modern civilization. In a sense, Hegel does embody the essence of the Central European cultural life, which, subsequent to his influence, has changed so considerably. Having played a certain role in Central Europe, this cultural life is just about beginning to disappear from this region.

Hegel was born in Stuttgart, in Swabia; he spent his maturing years of development of his particular spiritual character in middle Germany. In the last period of his life, he was a personality of great consequence in northern Germany, where he was particularly influential in public education, but also in a number of other cultural concerns of that region. Born on August 27, 1770, having developed slowly because of a certain sluggish mentality, Hegel attended the University of Tuebingen where he studied theology. Above all else, he made the acquaintance of the much more mentally mobile and quick, young Schelling.⁷⁰ He also became acquainted with Hoelderlin,⁷¹ who, one might say, transposed the melancholic sentiments of ancient Greece into modern times. In close relationship with these two, Hegel spent his years of study in Tuebingen. Then, like Schelling, he turned to middle Germany, to the University of Jena in Thuringia, where, again like Schelling, attracted to the personality of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, he made his first attempts at working out his own ideas of a world view. He taught at the University until 1806. In that year, while Napoleon's cannons thundered around Jena, he concluded his first sizable independent work, his Phenomenology of the Spirit. This work contains the attempt to re-experience in thoughts all that human consciousness can experience—from the dimmest impressions of the world to that mental clarity in which the human being experiences the world of ideas with such intensity that this ideal world itself appears to him as the very substance of spirit. One could say that this Phenomenology of the Spirit is something like a world tour of the spirit.

The difficult conditions in Germany at that time brought an end to Hegel's position at the University of Jena. Yet he continued to remain in middle Germany, and for the next year or so edited a political newspaper in Bamberg. Then he was principal of a secondary school in Nuremberg, until he took a position as professor at the University of Heidelberg for a few years. During his years in Nuremberg, Hegel completed his most important work, Science of Logic. In Heidelberg, he wrote his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Then he was called to the University of Berlin, which had been founded on the spirit of Fichte and Humboldt. There, his activity expanded in influence and authority to cover the entire educational system then being administered from Berlin, as well as other matters of cultural importance.

Hegel was a strange personality even in outward appearance when he lectured. Before him were the written pages of his manuscript, which, so it seems, were always in disarray so that he was constantly turning and searching among his pages. He was somewhat awkward in his presentation and laborious in his delivery. While he was lecturing, the thought within him worked out of deep substrata of the soul, forming itself only with great difficulty into a word, which then issued forth as if in a stuttering, disjointed manner. Yet, his lecture, which reached its audience in this way as if constantly interrupting itself, is supposed to have made an extraordinarily grand impression on those who were capable of appreciating such a personality. In other ways, too, Hegel had remarkable personal qualities. He truly entered into and familiarized himself with the whole structure of the environment in which he happened to find himself. Thus, one can observe how he actually outgrew the Swabian milieu. One can see that he retained within himself the Swabian spirit with all its special characteristic features until he went to Switzerland and Frankfurt/Main—he spent some time as a private tutor in both Switzerland and Frankfurt after graduating from the university—where he again merged relatively quickly with the life of his new surroundings.

Then he moved to Jena, where Fichte's fiery spirit operated, where, above all else, there existed something like a concentrated summation of the entire cultural essence of Central Europe—a time of which people today can scarcely form a picture. It was indeed so that when Fichte presented his expositions in the university auditorium, which, in his characteristic manner, were on a high spiritual, yet nevertheless abstract level, these discourses were continued and carried on in debates right out into the streets and squares of Jena. In very truth, a lecture by Fichte was not merely a discussion pertaining to questions of one or another kind, but an event. It was an event also in this respect, that at that time, from all around Jena, individuals in need of a world outlook came to hear Fichte speak. One who reads the correspondence, of which there is a great deal, in which people tell of hearing Fichte in Jena, will again and again come across passages testifying to Fichte's tremendous spiritual influence. Indeed, long after Fichte had died, decades later, people who had heard him in Jena still spoke of the great influence he had upon their soul life. The philosophical fire-spirit, Schelling, was stimulated by what flowed as the power of spirit into the world; the more ponderous Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was motivated as well, and joined forces with Schelling to develop Fichte's philosophy further. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Schelling and Hegel published the Critical Journal of Philosophy in Jena. Its articles certainly stood on the highest levels of abstract philosophical thinking, but in such a manner that one sees how these utterances, couched in thin abstractions, concern themselves—as though welling up straight from the human heart—with those affairs of human life and the world that have always been the high points of all striving for a world concept. Following this, Hegel worked his way to a certain independence, and in 1806 wrote his Phenomenology of the Spirit, which, however, is actually a phenomenology of consciousness.

As I said, Hegel always stood completely within his milieu. The riddles of his surroundings worked deep within him. Just as the Swabian spirit with its depth, as found in a few select Swabians, was so strongly revealed in Hegel's youth, so was this whole spirit of philosophy, comprising in concentrated form the whole new cultural striving, that took hold of him in Jena at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was out of this philosophical spirit that he wrote and taught, a spirit which was always nourished, and increasingly maintained, however, by an overview of the general world condition.

Out of this spirit, too, arose Hegel's Logic—no ordinary logic, but something entirely different. It was written in the second decade of the nineteenth century. One is moved to say that the most singular of all kinds of human striving on the highest level manifests itself in this Hegelian logic.

To Hegel, logic was something akin to a summation of what Hellenism, in a manner somewhat different from Hegel's, understood as logos or universal reason. During the profound inner experience that Hegel underwent while working out his Phenomenology of the Spirit, he began to feel strongly that if man works himself up to the intensive experience of the “idea,” hence the ideas of the world, then this experiencing of the “idea” is no longer a mere thought experience but one of the divine cosmic element in all its truth, purity, and light-filled clarity. Something that had pulsed for centuries in the minds and souls of Central Europe came into inner soul existence at that time in Hegel. One need only recall the deep mysticism of Meister Eckhart, of Johannes Tauler. Recently, we have become acquainted with this mysticism from another side; yet it nevertheless remains profound—for the experience remains the same, after all, even if one is familiar with the deeper occult foundations of which I spoke here a few days ago.⁷² One need only think of this mystical experience that became an inner revelation, as in Valentin Weigel, even in Paracelsus or in Jacob Boehme. One need only transform for oneself into the bright, light-filled clarity of universal ideas what minds such as Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler experienced more out of intense feeling than something abstract, what Jacob Boehme set out in images through inner experience, hence replacing the mysticism of feeling and imagery with the mysticism of ideas; then one has the experience that was Hegel's when he wrote his Logic. It was the soul's surrender to pure ideas, but in the conviction that these ideas are the very substance of the universe. It was a dwelling in something that Nietzsche later called the cold, icy realm of ideas. To Hegel, on the other hand, this was accompanied by the awareness that such an experience of the ideas was a dialogue with the cosmic spirit itself.

What Hegel experienced, not in a vaguely defined unity of the world, not in such vague concepts as those produced by the Pantheists, but in concrete ideas that were followed through from simple “existence” all the way to the fully saturated “idea of the organism” and the “spirit,” what can be experienced to the full extent of the developed world of ideas, this Hegel summed up in his Logic. Thus, it is the intent in his Logic to present a structure of those ideas attainable for the human being, ideas which, as man experiences them, simultaneously demonstrate the certainty that they are of the same element by which the universal spirit allows reality to come into being. This is why Hegel called the contents of his Logic the divinity prior to the creation of the world. Yet, icy is the region in which a person finds himself who studies Hegel's Logic; this is because Hegel moves entirely in what the ordinary person calls the uttermost abstraction. He begins by presenting “being” as the simplest idea; then he passes over to “nothingness”; proceeds dialectically from “being” through “nothingness” to “becoming,” to “existence,” and on to “causality.” One does not gain from this what the ordinary person wants when he wishes to be filled inwardly in his soul with divine cosmic warmth. Instead, one receives what in ordinary life would be called a sum of abstract ideas.

What is this Logic? When it is really contemplated, this Logic becomes an experience; it even turns into an experience that can give a person much information about many a secret of humanity and the world in general. One is induced to say that what is experienced through Hegel's Logic can really only be characterized by means of spiritual science. It is only through spiritual science that one finds words to characterize this experience. This is a remarkable discovery. Hegel's pupil, Rosenkranz,⁷³ who was devoted to his master, has presented us with a biography of Hegel, written not only in a kindly but also a spirited manner. In it, he uses words that are, I might say, in a certain respect significant for the events of that time. It was around the mid-forties of the nineteenth century that he said, “We are actually the grave diggers of the great philosophers.” Rosenkranz then lists the great philosophers who rose from European civilization during the period near the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, and how they actually died within that same period. One experiences a melancholy feeling when reading this passage in Rosenkranz's biography of Hegel, for something very true has been expressed. As this nineteenth century advanced step by step, it became the grave digger not only of the philosophers but of philosophy itself, indeed, of the profound questions dealing with world concepts. The decay of European civilization, now approaching us with giant strides, first announced itself in the lofty regions of philosophy. The presumptuous philosophical systems of the second half of the nineteenth century are at bottom expressions of decline.

On the basis of spiritual science, on the other hand, one cannot speak as did Rosenkranz; based on spiritual science, I would say that even what is outwardly, physically dead must also come to life. For what is eternal in the human being works on eternally, on one side in super-sensible worlds, but on the other side also in the earthly realm itself; and if it falls to the impulses of decline to have grave diggers, it is up to spiritual science to seek out what is eternally alive soul essence in what is dead and to place it before the world in its ever continuing life. Therefore, I would like to speak today not of the dead but of the living Hegel.

To be sure, however, living personalities of Hegel's kind also become, in a certain sense, sharp critics of what—partly from indolence of soul, partly from sheer bad will—presently forms an alliance with the powers of decadence. Therefore, from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, I must say: Yes, it is true that Hegel's logical dialectic runs its course in the cold, icy realm of what at first seem to be abstract concepts. To experience Hegel's Logic actually means finding oneself dwelling in a multitude of concepts, which a thoughtless person does not care for, about which the thoughtless man would say, “That does not interest me.” But this conceptual world of Hegel's, this sum of apparent abstractions, these icy, cold concepts, what exactly are they? One can investigate what these concepts are, particularly through what spiritual science offers us. There is no doubt that they cannot be eternal universal reason itself, for universal reason could never have created from this sum of pure abstractions the entire multiform and, above all, warmth-pervaded world of ours. These logical concepts, these logical ideas, seem like transparent conceptual veils; indeed, Hegel himself calls his logical ideas shadow images.

Therefore, what Hegel initially experienced in this logic is, of course, something that it cannot be. It is a sum of ideas that begin with “being,” pass from “nothingness” to “becoming,” and so on through many such concepts, ending with the “idea bearing its own purpose within itself ”—therefore, concluding with what ordinary consciousness would also still call an abstraction. It is certain then that the world could not have been created out of such ideas; nor is this logic to be viewed as the living spirit, that is, what must be grasped in supersensory perception as living spirit. Indeed, I would say, it is out of an admittedly subjective feeling that Hegel declares that the contents of this logic are the thoughts of God prior to the world's creation. Out of these thoughts, one could never in any way comprehend the rich abundance of the created world. And yet, if one allows oneself to go into these thoughts, the experience is a strong and powerful one. What exactly is it then that is contained in this logic?

Look at our building here.⁷⁴ It is intended to have as the central group in the middle of the eastern end a kind of Christ figure, with Lucifer rising above it, and below Ahriman, as though being thrust into the earth by the Representative of Humanity, who inwardly preserves complete balance of soul. The intention is to represent the full human condition in this group. In reality, man is, after all, that being who must seek the balance between what tries to rise above the human being and what draws him down into the ground—the balance between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic nature. Physiologically, physically speaking, the Luciferic force is that element in us which brings about fever, pleurisy, which brings man into conditions of warmth that tend to dissolve him, cause him to be dissipated in the world; the Ahrimanic force brings about ossification, calcification. Speaking of the soul level, man is the entity who must seek the equilibrium, on the one hand, between rapturous mysticism—between theory, between all that strives to the insubstantial but nevertheless light-irradiated realm—and what pulls him down, on the other hand, to the pedantic, philistine, materialistic and intellectualistic sphere. Spiritually speaking, man must hold the balance between the Luciferic force always wishing to lull him to sleep, always tempting him to yield himself up to the universal all, and the Ahrimanic force that shocks him awake again and again, striking through him with a violence that does not let him sleep. One does not comprehend the nature of the human being if one cannot place it in the middle between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic force.

Yet, the experience of the human soul at this middle point is a complicated one; the soul can only fully experience this complexity in its development in the course of time, and one must understand each of the successive stages of this development. One can say that whoever understands Hegel and the way he elaborated his Logic can see how, at that time, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, mankind began to calcify, to become materialistic, to densify inwardly, to become entangled in matter. In the realm of knowledge and perception, this age gives the impression of sinking down into matter. As in a picture, humanity appears to be sinking into the material element, with Hegel standing in the center, working himself out of it with all his might and snatching away from Ahriman what he has that is good, namely, the abstract logic that we need for our inner liberation, without which we will not achieve pure thinking. Hegel wrests this logic from the powers of gravity, from the terrestrial powers, presenting it in all its cold abstractness, so that it may not live in the Ahrimanic element dwelling in man, but can rise into human thinking. Yes, this Hegelian logic is wrested from the Ahrimanic powers, torn free from them and bestowed on humanity. This is what mankind needs and without which it cannot progress—which, however, had first to be rescued from Ahriman.

Thus, Hegelian logic actually remains something eternal; thus it must continue to be effective. It must ever and again be sought for. We cannot do without it. If we try to manage without it, we either fall back into the nebulous softness of “Schleiermacherei,”^T1 or we founder in what people immediately became enmeshed in when they have approached Hegel without being able to grasp him. For there appears on the one side the image of Hegel, who Lifts himself out of Ahriman's realm, who rescues from Ahriman what, as pure logic, has to be saved for mankind, actually has to be saved for human thinking. On the other side, there arises the image of Karl Marx, who also orients himself on Hegel, taking up Hegel's thinking, but is gripped by Ahriman's claws and dragged into the lowest depths of the material bog—who by Hegel's method arrives at historical materialism. Here, we cannot help but see, side by side, the upward striving spirit, snatching the logic away from Ahriman, because, with this logic, one must truly keep oneself upright by means of all one's inner human soul forces, and the one who, with this logic, sinks into the Ahrimanic morass.

Hegel actually appears as a spirit that can be understood only if one tries to comprehend him with the concepts which only spiritual science can supply. This is what Hegel became through the influence brought to bear on him by Fichte's fiery words in Jena, the essence of which he then formulated in his way, during his subsequent sojourns in Bamberg, Nuremberg and Heidelberg.

Subsequently, he was transferred to northern Germany. He always experienced fully what his surroundings contained. In a humanly personal manner, his inner life awakened to what was around him. Thus he became the influential genius of the University of Berlin. Now the world experienced through him that work which he had to create out of the very middle of the modern civilized world if he was truly a spirit fully belonging to this middle. In the last few weeks, we have, after all, been characterizing the East, the Middle, and the West. We have found that it is the economic thinking that flourishes particularly in the West; in the East, spiritual thinking flourished; in the Middle, the legal, political element has chiefly raised itself to a special flowering. Fichte has written a work dealing with natural law. The most enlightened minds occupied themselves with ideas concerning human rights. It was just at the time of his move to northern Germany that Hegel gave the world his Basic Principles of the Philosophy of Rights or Natural Rights and Science of the State in Outline. Everything that could be termed a defamation of Hegel was due chiefly to this book, which contains the remarkable sentence: “Everything reasonable is real, and everything real is reasonable.”⁷⁵

Whoever can appreciate that it was Hegel who wrested human reason from the clutches of the Ahrimanic powers will also recognize his right to search it out, and to make it effectual throughout the world. Thus, because his field of action was the Ahrimanic which cannot lead a person upward to what lies before birth or into what is active after death, Hegel became an interpreter of spirituality, but only of the physical, earthly one; he turned into a philosopher of natural science and history. Yet he depicted what dwells in the external world in the relation of man to man and which then develops systematically as organized human life. This he summed up in his concept of “objective spirit.” In the expression of rights, in morality, in the implementation of treaties and so forth, he beheld the spirit active in the social organization itself. Regarding these matters, he stood completely within not only the spatial, but also the temporal milieu. It was not yet the trend of that time, particularly in the area where Hegel lived, to worship the state as much as was the case later on. Therefore, it is incorrect to view the concept of the state appearing in Hegel's writing in the same light as must be done in regard to later times. Within his structure of the state, for example, Hegel still acknowledged free corporations, a corporate life. All the antihuman elements that made their appearance later in the Prussian realm were not yet in evidence when Hegel, one might say, deified the idea of the state in Prussia of all places; but this grew out of his attempt to see at work in the world that reason which he had wrested from Ahriman through his logic.

Thus, we cannot help but say that this is basically the tragedy that has since been enacted historically in such a shocking way. The element living in Middle Europe is indeed something we must not regard in the same way as do Western eyes, particularly since the mendacities of recent years. It is something best characterized by the fact that, even now, it gives the impression to a mind such as Oswald Spengler's that the only social salvation for the impending age of decline must come through Central Europe, not in order to counteract the decline—Spengler does not believe in such counteraction—but merely to make the decline that will take place tolerable, until, in the beginning of the next millennium, total barbarism supposedly will come into being.

One can say that in the twenties of the nineteenth century Hegel appears as the ruling spirit governing the whole realm of Prussian education; he stands there with the kind of reasonableness I have just characterized for you. It is a reasonableness that is born, as it were, out of the ice of Ahriman, but it also possesses in its spirit structure something of an inner firmness, having nothing mathematical about it, yet containing a tremendous force, an element of fine spirituality.

Now, one has to understand that what was present as the special element of Central Europe has to be characterized also from this aspect: that right into the ninth century its lack of culture still included the practice of blood sacrifice. This showed characteristics that have a certain value when taken up by such a spirit as Hegel's. Such a spirituality, however, is rare, it does not repeat itself. Hegel's students were basically all small minds, and the one who, in a certain respect, was a great mind, Karl Marx, quickly succumbed to the Ahrimanic powers. The element which then gained ground was the very one that precipitated the plunge into the Ahrimanic abyss.

Hegel salvaged something from what plunged into this abyss—something that must be eternal, something he could only salvage because it was saved from just this element. It was necessary that this be done by a person whose soul essence was of the very being of Middle Europe. This was the case with Hegel. He was Swabian by birth and by virtue of the region of his youth: middle German, Franconian and Thuringian in respect to his maturation; and he was so pronouncedly Prussian in the final period of his life that he experienced Prussia as the center of the world, with Berlin as the very center of this world center.

There is a certain inherent force in Hegelianism, truly not a physical force but a different one, namely a spiritual force; Hegelianism contains something that must be taken up by every spiritual world view. For any spiritual science would have to become rachitic if it could not be permeated by the skeletal system of ideas which Hegel wrested from the ossifying grip of Ahriman. We need this system to become inwardly strong in a certain manner. We have need of this sober thoughtfulness if, in our spiritual endeavors, we wish to avoid the degeneracy of nebulous, cozy mysticism. We also need the force that lived in Hegel; we require the force of his creed of reason, if we do not wish to sink into what Karl Marx directly succumbed to when he tried independently to work himself into Hegel's mentality.

It would really be necessary at this point in time—which is perhaps one of the most important moments, more important even than 1914—that as many people as possible recall this significant element in Hegel. For a true recognition, especially of Hegel, could bring about a certain awakening of soul. And an awakening is needed! No one believes, no one wishes to believe, what dangers are actually at work in European civilization and its American appendage; one does not wish to believe what forces of decline prevail. In public life today, only the forces of decline are taken into account. No one wishes to perceive, to feel the uplifting forces. Let us focus on single characteristic things that just recently may have caught our attention. What thoughts are harbored, for instance, in the attitude becoming prevalent now in the civilized world in regard to the traditional spiritual life? I am not referring to our spiritual life, for we intend to bring a new spirit into humanity's civilization. What are the thoughts in the attitude of mind now growing and spreading in relation to the life of the spirit? You can find such thoughts in a recent article⁷⁶ written by the rector of the University of Halle for the Hallischen Nachrichten under the title, “Gradual Abolition of the Universities.” He states:

At least this much appears certain, namely, that a government agency has actually put forward the suggestion to close down a part of the German universities. Other educational tasks are held to be more important, and it is believed that greater financial resources have to be freed for them. Since these resources are unavailable, it is thought that a number of universities should be abolished in order to found a type of civil service school where persons who have not attended a university would be educated so that they could administer the official posts allotted to them.

So, civil service training begins! In Russia it is going at full speed. And the Western world pays no attention! They will have to pay bitter attention to it, however, if an awakening of souls does not take place, if even the best minds continually turn a deaf ear to all that refers to the spirit; and, for their own amusement, certainly not for the good of this world, they continue to entertain the world with the timeworn slogans of liberalism, conservatism, pacificism, and so on.

And particularly morality among our intellectuals is fast going downhill. Here is a small indication of it. But first, I must mention that when Ernst Haeckel retired from his professorship at Jena, he himself chose as his successor his pupil Plate,⁷⁷ who had recently arrived from Berlin. He installed him, so to speak, for Haeckel's voice really carried weight at the University of Jena at the time of his retirement. He installed Plate in all the responsible posts he had held: His professorship, his administration of the Zoological Institute and the Phyletic Museum, established for Haeckel himself on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday⁷⁸ by the Haeckel Foundation that had come into existence. It was from all this that Haeckel withdrew, installing in his place his pupil Plate. Now I would like to read you a news item⁷⁹ of a few days ago:

One year ago, eight days after Haeckel's death, an obituary notice in the Berliner Tageblatt by Dr. Adolf Heilborn made the first mention of the martyrdom inflicted on Haeckel during the last ten years of his life, as a result of the conduct of Professor Ludwig Plate. On April 1, 1909, Haeckel had relinquished the chair of zoology at Jena, which he had occupied for forty-eight years, and the directorship of the Zoological Institute and Phyletic Museum to his former pupil Ludwig Plate, for which the latter expressed his heartiest thanks to “his highly honored Excellency.” Upon settling down in his new positions, one of Plate's first official acts was to demand that Haeckel clear out his workroom in the Zoological Institute without delay. When Haeckel protested,⁸⁰ Plate's explanation was: “Since April 1, I have been sole director of the Phyletic Museum, and you are to comply without question to all my directions.” This prelude and the further developments of the conflict were related in simple words by Heilborn who was Haeckel's pupil and friend, with the result that Professor Ludwig Plate brought an action of libel against him at the District Court in Jena. Following this, Dr. Heilborn made public all the relevant facts in a small brochure, The Lear-Tragedy of Ernst Haeckel (Hoffman & Campe, Hamburg/Berlin 1920), based on Haeckel's unpublished letters and notes, and on official documents. Heilborn could make use of a turn of phrase that a witty advocate once used before the court: “I move for the condemnation of my respected Opponent on the same grounds which he himself has brought forward.” Nothing weighed more against Plate than his own remarks. From Haeckel, who had made endowments to the University of over a million marks, who had donated his large library and collections representing fifty-five years of work to it, Plate demanded the return of a-number of allegedly missing books, and at another time the return of a considerable number of cardboard boxes. Furthermore, Plate stated the following: “This grave injustice which has been done to me can never be erased; however, in recognition of his great services to science and because he is my former teacher, I shall forgive him.”—and “No one will hold it against me that after all these experiences I have broken off all personal contact with Haeckel.”

So much for Plate versus Haeckel. I am reminded of a lecture once given by Ottokar Lorenz,⁸¹ one of the better historians of earlier times. I did not agree with its content, but one expression appealed to me that he used right at the beginning. At a Schiller jubilee, Ottokar Lorenz had to lecture on “Schiller as a Historian.” As I said, I did not agree with the content, but he said:

Indeed, from the standpoint of present-day science, there is actually nothing more to be said about Schiller as a historian. If I nevertheless do say something more, it will be on behalf of the High Senate and my honored colleagues.

The High Senate and the colleagues were all sitting there. Now follows what we could call a special declaration by the High Senate and the colleagues. For he says:

“ In the academic world of Jena, Plate stood quite alone.”

—I question whether he stood by himself when he came into the lecture hall!?

The anatomist Schwalbe once wrote: “It is unbelievable ... how Plate behaved. I am amazed that the students in Jena did not react. It would be a really good deed if they could make it too hot for him in Jena.”

Thus write the professors, the "honored colleagues," who thoroughly deplore that the students did not manage to torment Plate enough to make him leave Jena. These honored colleagues who write like this—in private letters, of course have, however, carefully avoided being unfriendly to Professor Plate when he enters the lecture hall.

Heinrich Heine once said that Lessing's opponents, due to their association with him, were preserved, like an insect in amber, from vanishing without a trace. Now it would be discourteous to apply this comparison to living persons, however well it would fit in a scientific context. We will therefore content ourselves with Heilborn's remark to the effect that nothing will remain of Plate's name and work except the sinister remembrance of the martyrdom that he inflicted on Haeckel.

One could cite a great many similar examples of academic morality, of the morality of the present-day intelligentsia. What comes to light thereby is that today we have to do not merely with the struggle of this or that world-view versus another; we are dealing today with the struggle of truth against the lie, and in this conflict it is the lie that directs its weapons against the truth. Today, truth's struggle against falsehood, which is extending its grip further and further on mankind, is more important than any dispute over other concepts.

It was perhaps thought to be exaggerated when, in a recent lecture, I said that the people of Europe are asleep. They will have to experience bitterly—I mentioned this in a different context—how the most extreme effect of the Western world concept is spreading in Bolshevism across all of Asia, and will be taken up by the people of Asia with the same fervor with which they received their sacred Brahman at one time. This will indeed happen, and modern civilization will have to face up to it. And one feels the deepest pain on seeing the sleeping souls in Europe, who fall so completely to evoke in their minds that real earnestness which is what matters today.

A few days after I had expressed this here, I came across the following news item:

Some days ago, I had the opportunity to take a look at a 10,000 ruble note in possession of a representative of the Soviet Republic. What astonished me was not so much its high denomination; rather, what struck me was that in the center the bank note bore a finely and clearly drawn swastika.

This symbol, which a Hindu or an ancient Egyptian once looked upon when he spoke of his sacred Brahman, is seen today on a 10,000 ruble note! In the strongholds of politics, people know how to influence human souls. One knows what the victorious advance of the swastika signifies, the sign which a great number of people in Central Europe are already wearing today—again based on other underlying reasons—one knows what it means. Yet one is unwilling to listen to something that seeks to interpret the secrets of today's historical developments out of the most important symptoms.

This interpretation, however, can proceed only out of what can come to light through spiritual science. One must take a good look at what is presently going on. One must focus on the tendency to devastation in regard to the established cultural life, the tendency that is seeking to transform even the vestiges of this old cultural life into schools for civil servants and bureaucratic machinery, and that has morally sunk down to a low point such as I described to you in regard to Herr Plate, who is Haeckel's closest pupil, the favorite pupil of that inwardly decent, good man, Haeckel! Haeckel did not do things like that; the Ahrimanic, materialistic culture does.

In this age—in which one knows how to proceed if one goes about it consciously—one should recall great minds such as Hegel, born 150 years ago in Stuttgart, who in an inner struggle of soul and spirit wrested from the Ahrimanic powers those concepts and ideas which are needed to acquire sufficient inner spiritual steadfastness for ascending the ladder into the spiritual world; but who also offers much else of inner spiritual discipline. Truly, through the way in which his ideas can be alive now, Hegel should be treasured on the part of spiritual science; and because of what can live of him today, let us commemorate him today, on this, his 150th birthday.

He died of cholera on November 14, 1831, in Berlin, on the anniversary of the death of Leibnitz, the great European philosopher. What he has left behind, has, to begin with, either been misunderstood in the outer world, or been misrepresented by his students, or else has been dragged down directly into the Ahrimanic sphere, as in Marxism. With the help of spiritual science, the soil must be found in which the eternally enduring force that was born 150 years ago in Stuttgart in Georg Friedrich Hegel—a force containing the best extract of European spiritual life, which exerted its influence throughout sixty years in Middle Europe—can grow. It must not be buried; it must be awakened to life in spiritual science, a life such as we now truly need in this intellectual, moral and economic decline.

• 70. Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling: 1775–1854.
• 71. Friedrich Hoelderlin: 1770–1843.
• 72. See Lecture IV of this volume.
• 73. Karl Rosenkranz: 1805–1879, philosopher and literary historian. Hegel's Leben, Berlin, 1844.
• 74. Rudolf Steiner: Der Baugedanke des Goetheanum, Gesamtausgabe Stuttgart, 1958.
• T1. “Schleiermacherei”—an apt play on words around the name of Hegel's contemporary, F.D.E. Schleiermacher (lit. = veil maker). Steiner described his world view as ardently devotional and sincere, but introspective. See Riddles of Philosophy, pp. 165–168.
• 75. Literally, this sentence says: “What is rational, is real; and what is real is rational.” From preface to Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1821.
• 76. Professor Paul Menzer: “Abbau der Universitaeten?” in “Hallische Nachrichten,” August 18, 1920.
• 77. Ludwig Plate, 1862–1937.
• 78. The Phyletic Museum of the University of Jena was founded in 1907, and according to its foundation-charter was "intended for the development and dissemination of the teaching of evolution as well as morphology and anthropology." Already in 1886, Ernst Haeckel had tried to realize the plan of the museum with the help of the so-called Ritter-Foundation, but had failed because of the Opposition of the donor, Paul von Ritter. It is quite possible that on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Haeckel talked about this planned museum in Dr. Steiner's presence. For Haeckel's birthday, his students and friends collected money for a marble bust. More money was collected than was needed. In 1894, this surplus of 10,000 marks still existed when the museum was established. It was then included in the capital of the foundation. In a footnote to a letter from Haeckel to Carneri on March 23, 1907, the publisher of the letters writes, “The construction of the Phyletic Museum in Jena was of great significance for the popularization of the teaching of evolution. For a long time, Haeckel had been envisioning such a ‘public-spirited center of education,’ namely, a collection ... in which the most pertinent facts of phylogeny would be suitably placed together, ... preparations, pictures and explanations would aid the public's understanding. The necessary fmancial means came together through donations.” Rudolf Steiner was aware of all these matters.
• 79. Refers to the article by E.F.: “Haeckel und—Plate,” in the “Berliner Tageblatt,” evening edition of August 19, 1920.
• 80 . The writer of the article, E.F., bypasses the true facts with his report. Compare with this Heilborn's description on pp. 12 and 13 of his pamphlet, Die Lear-Tragoedie Ernst Haeckels: “One of Plate's first official actions after his move was the demand that Haeckel immediately clear out his study in the zoological institute. The elderly scientist was at that moment suffering from severe rheumatism. In order to be able to comply with Plate's request, Haeckel had to have himself carried into the institute ... This hasty move then took place in the custodian's and Haeckel's daughter's presence; a move that required the transport of letters, documents and books across to the Phyletic Museum. In two days, this was accomplished. Haeckel was just surveying his new workroom when the recently appointed director of the museum, Plate, appeared, announcing that he was requisitioning the„assistant's room for his ... 84 cages of live mice that he had brought with him ... for the purpose of genetic tests. Haeckel ... protested against this because of the unavoidable dirt and smell of such a breeding center and asked whether the mice couldn't be housed somewhere else in Jena besides the brand-new museum. Haeckel suggested ... a room in the zoological institute for this purpose. Plate, however, did not like this, because the foul smell would be too irksome for him in the adjacent laboratory. When Haeckel remarked that surely he had a voice in the matter of the arrangements in the Phyletic Museum, which was to serve purposes other than the raising of mice, especially since the museum had cost him two years of work and a great part of his own fmancial resources, Plate declared as if with the full weight of his office, ‘I am sole director of the Phyletic Museum since April 1 and you have to submit to all my orders without exception.’ A bitter exchange of words ensued and the elderly Haeckel finally said, ‘You treat me like an assistant who is twenty years younger, not like your teacher who is thirty years older!’ Plate left without a word ... This was the first tribute of gratitude on the part of the ‘sincerely devoted old pupil’ and the first expression of his ‘special joy over furnishing the museum together with Haeckel according to the latter's intentions!’”
• 81 . Ottokar Lorenz: 1832–1904, Austrian historian.