The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Last version, June 1920

The appeal “To the German People and to the Cultural World” written by Dr. Rudolf Steiner proposes the threefold social order. He calls for:

1. The complete independence of spiritual life, including the education and school system. He points out the spiritual inability of our time, insofar as it has its causes in the state's exploitation of spiritual culture. He demands the complete self-administration of this culture from a purely objective and general human point of view.

2. The restriction of state life to all those circumstances in which all people are equal before each other. On this basis, and with the strictest democracy, the current privately capitalist ownership and wage labor conditions can be transformed, especially to achieve such a general human right that the worker can stand as a completely free personality in relation to the labor manager, who is only a spiritual worker.

3. An economic life in which the worker confronts the labor manager in such a way that a free social relationship can come about between the two through a contract for services, so that the wage relationship ceases altogether. For this, the complete socialization of economic life is necessary. Only from the appropriate formation of corresponding cooperatives, which arise from the professions on the one hand and the needs of consumers and producers on the other, can a value regulation of goods emerge that ensures a dignified existence for all people.

Large sections of the German people, who have taken up the proposals of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, are imbued with the realization that at the present time of deepest need, the world-historical task of the German people is, by taking up this impulse, not only to save themselves from the fall into the abyss from which the leading circles, through their lack of understanding of the demands of modern times, have brought it to the brink, but that it can also lay the foundation for the liberation of all people from the oppression of the all-devouring economic policy and the imperialist states that serve it.

The broad masses of the working people have been plunged into physical and mental hardship as a result of being completely absorbed into the economic life of soul-destroying capitalism. They therefore expect a betterment of their situation from a purely economic revolution. They are raising the demand for the socialization of economic life. However, a one-sided socialization of economic life would only be a sham socialization. In it, the previous dictatorship of capitalism would be replaced by a bureaucracy that levels everything and inhibits all free human development, which would lead to a complete mechanization of all human activity and thus to a dehumanization of the human being. This danger can only be counteracted by simultaneously liberating intellectual life from state paternalism and economic dependence. An independent intellectual life, through the cultivation of all human talents and abilities, will be able to constantly supply new constructive forces to economic life, which would otherwise have to consume itself.

Until the outbreak of the world war catastrophe, the German people were proud of their intellectual life. And yet, despite all its much-vaunted achievements, this intellectual life was neither able to provide the ideas for a social order at home that could have met the newer demands of humanity, nor could it fulfill its task abroad. The fact that Germany has not been able to set herself a world-historical mission in the last five decades has driven her into the catastrophe of the World War; the lack of consciousness of such a mission during the World War was bound to result in her defeat in it. The Russian East could have received form and expression for its spiritual yearning from German intellectual life. Instead, it received the “peace” of Brest-Litovsk, which emerged from completely different than intellectual foundations. Germany could not counter the imperialist capitalism that was advancing from the West with its own political will - it capitulated to Wilson's abstract Fourteen Points.

Through the threefold social organism, the German people could have offered the West the example of a healthy socialization of economic life, and the East a strong spiritual life, independent and free from mystical obscurity.

In our time of deepest distress, the German people should finally awaken to the realization of their spiritual task. They should find their way to the pioneers of a free German intellectual life, to Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, to the great creator of the plan of the ideal university, Fichte, to the glorifier of the true academic essence, Schelling, and to Hegel. It would have to show understanding for the demands of humanity in modern times and recognize that, even if the demands of the revolution are initially asserted in the consciousness of the broad masses in a one-sided way in the economic sphere, their driving forces in the depths of the soul are nevertheless aimed at recognition of human rights and human dignity. It would have to recognize that the soul impulse for freedom lives in them. Then it would realize that true human welfare can only arise when the spiritual life is based on individual human freedom in the most comprehensive sense, and that it is the task of the German spirit to realize the freedom of the spiritual life.^{1The philosophical basis for this demand is given in Rudolf Steiner's “Philosophy of Freedom», which appeared in a new edition in 1918, Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, Berlin W, Motzstraße [note in the appeal]} Therefore, it must now be demanded that the state release spiritual culture and that the entire spiritual life create its free self-government from a purely objective and general human point of view. This applies first and foremost to the education and school system. One will only educate properly when the question, “How do you educate all people to become true, capable human beings?” is no longer open to anyone except those who, only from human nature itself, set their goals for education and teaching. Then schools will no longer see their task as training young people for specific, externally prescribed purposes, but rather as forming fully developed, free human beings. These will then naturally develop a lively relationship to their duties in the service of the community. In an independent intellectual life, all schools will be free institutions of the spiritual member of the social organism, whose members will be supported by the trust of the general public. The funds for education and teaching will no longer be raised indirectly through the state; rather, the spiritual organism will itself be a member of the economic system, as far as its economic circumstances are concerned, and will draw its means of existence directly from it, without the spiritual organism becoming dependent on economic interests as a result.

The first result in the field of education will be the emergence of a primary school that will be a unified school built from the same point of view for all people, a true psychological anthropology. In the sense of a pedagogical economy, this school will be built on a true understanding of the developing human being. It will educate the thinking, feeling and willing faculties in such a way that a strong personality develops, whose soul unfolds a sustaining power for the whole of life. In this free school, truly human arts and skills will also be cultivated that the state does not cultivate because it has no interest in them. All artistic exercises will have an outstanding effect on the development of the will. Such a primary school will provide a useful educational foundation for all physical and mental workers. The secondary modern school will build on the primary school, on the one hand, and the intermediate technical schools, on the other. These will develop a living relationship with the professions for which they prepare, through a constant back and forth of teachers between their work in the subject taught and the practice of a practical profession. Such a practice will also become established for the universities.

The liberation of intellectual life will have a decisive impact on the university system. The autonomy of the universities will be restored. The state system of qualifications and all state examinations will be discontinued. Instead, in future the certificates of the free schools and colleges will be statements of the abilities and knowledge that students have acquired by graduating from them. Independently of intellectual life, the state will be able to test those it wishes to employ within state political life on its own soil for their suitability for the positions it awards.

All state or economic influence on the teaching content of the individual sciences themselves will cease. Science and its teaching will be truly free.

The following basic requirements arise from what has been said, and their fulfillment is possible in the threefold social organism:

1. The liberation of teaching from all state supervision. The organization of primary education according to pedagogical and didactic principles, and its administration only by personalities who are part of the self-governing cultural community.

2. The abolition of state authorization for middle and vocational schools.

3. The autonomy of universities.

We hereby put these questions up for public discussion. We appeal to all those who care about culture in the broadest sense of the word, especially to the representatives of science and art, of education and teaching, and in particular to parents and, not least, to the academic youth. We also appeal to Germans living abroad, who, in their advanced positions, have always found the unhealthy mixing of cultural life with state and economic interests particularly painful. We call on all those who are willing to work towards the emancipation of intellectual life to join us in

formation of a community whose task it will be to restructure the entire teaching and education system in the sense of the above characterization. We are filled with the hope that through the joint work of such a free association of people, who are active in the most diverse

fields of intellectual life and who are imbued with the realization that the liberation of intellectual culture is the highest necessity of life, it will be possible to lay the foundation stone for the organization of a free, self-reliant spiritual life.

Stuttgart, Whitsun 1919
Champignystraße 17
The Working Committee of the Federation for
Threefolding of the Social Organism.

[179 signatures follow]

As in other places in Württemberg and Switzerland, I will take the liberty of speaking here about the most important and most pressing question of the present, the social question, and I will do so by referring to what has appeared in the appeal that went through the German lands some time ago, “To the German People and to the Cultural World”. The appeal, which advocates the threefold social order, may have come before most of you. The further explanations of what could only be briefly hinted at in such an appeal are given in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life'. Allow me to outline some of the things that need to be said about this appeal this evening.

The social question – this is clear to every human soul that is alert to current events – is that which has emerged in a completely new form from the tremendous, harrowing events of the world war catastrophe. The so-called social question or social movement, as we speak of it today, is at least more than half a century old. But anyone who considers what is announced today as a mighty historical wave and compares these things with each other may nevertheless say: this social question has taken on a completely new form in our present time, a form that no one should pass by.

How often have we heard the words in the last four to five years: This terrible world war catastrophe is something that people have not experienced since the beginning of what we call history. But still little, truly very little, is said today, when this world war catastrophe has entered into a crisis, about the necessity that completely new impulses are now also needed to restore life; that a complete rethinking and relearning is necessary - although actually the necessity for this rethinking and relearning is already outwardly apparent. For the old thoughts have led us straight into that terrible human catastrophe. New thoughts and new impulses must lead us out again. And where these impulses are to be found can be seen from a truly penetrating observation of the social demands that are emerging from more and more people's minds, and which can only be ignored by those who sleep through the times and wait for events to unfold until the old structure, as it were, collapses without substance.

Today, social issues are often seen as something highly obvious, sometimes as something highly simple. Anyone who judges not from gray theories, nor from individual personal demands, but from a truly broadened experience of the necessities of life in the present and the future, must see in this social question something into which many forces flow that have developed in the course of human development and, one can already say, have in a certain way been led towards their own destruction. To anyone who has an overview of these living conditions, the social question appears in three forms. It appears to him as a question of spiritual life, secondly as a question of legal life, and thirdly as a question of economic life. Now the last few centuries, and in particular the 19th century, and also the past two decades of the 20th century, have led to the belief that almost everything that belongs to the social question has to be sought in the economic sphere. The reasons why people see so little clearly are precisely because they think that they only have to find their way in the economic sphere and then all the others will follow by themselves. It will be necessary for the first parts of my reflection today to be devoted to an area of life that people do not want to talk about as a socially important area, even now, from either the left or the right, namely the area of spiritual life.

The demands that are called social come from the broad masses of the proletariat, who have undergone the threefold ordeal to the conditions of the present, which we will discuss later. And this proletariat has been almost entirely pushed into the mere economic life by the emergence of new technology and soul-destroying capitalism, as well as by the other cultural conditions. The demands of the proletariat arose out of economic life. Therefore, the social question of the present takes on an economic form because it arises first of all from the proletariat. But it is not just an economic question. The mere observation that traditional ideas are inadequate in the face of today's loud facts can teach us that within the social movement we are dealing not only with an economic and legal question, but above all with a question of the mind.

We are faced with a loud social fact across a large part of the civilized world. We have had party opinions and party programs, we have produced them. All thoughts, all party opinions now prove inadequate when faced with the facts. Today it is not a matter of continuing old party opinions, but of facing the facts directly and with complete seriousness and a sense of reality.

Let us first see how human life has developed in recent times, and then ran into disaster. Above all, we have to look at the deep, seemingly unbridgeable gulf that exists between the proletariat and the non-proletariat. If we look at the cultural life of this non-proletariat, what do we encounter? Certainly, this cultural life has been abundantly praised as a tremendous advance in the course of modern times. Again and again we have heard how, in this modern age, means of transport have brought people together across vast areas of the earth, which in older times, if prophetically described, would have been decried as utopian. Thought, it was always preached and praised, flies like lightning across distant lands and seas and so on. No one has grown tired of praising progress over and over again. But today it is necessary to add a different consideration to all of this. Today it is necessary to ask: Under what conditions did this progress come about? It could only come about by building on a foundation of the broad masses of humanity who could not participate in all that this culture has been so praised for, built on the foundation of broad masses of people who had to do their work for this culture of a few, which, in the form in which it was “created”, could only exist because these masses had no part in it. Now these broad masses have grown up, have come into their own, and are rightly demanding their share. Their demands are at the same time the great historical demands of the present for everyone who really understands the times. And when today the call for socialization of economic life is heard, he who understands the times recognizes in this call not merely the demands of one class of people, but at the same time an historical demand of human life in the present.

One peculiarity of the leading classes, who were the participants in the much-praised culture, is that in recent times they have missed almost every opportunity to somehow bridge the gap between them and the masses of the proletariat, who are increasingly coming forward with their legitimate demands. What was needed to bridge this gap was ideas that should have been incorporated into human, social life. It is a peculiarity of this newer intellectual life, which has been so widely praised, that it has become increasingly alien to real, true life. Individuals pursue only that life that directly encompasses them. For the broad masses of the people, no comprehensive ideas from our intellectual life, from our school education, could be found. Here is an example that, from the most diverse points of view, could be multiplied not tenfold but a hundredfold or more.

At the beginning of the century, a certain government councilor by the name of Kolb took a remarkable turn in his destiny. I am happy to mention this government councilor Kolb because the way he took his destiny into his own hands is worthy of honor, and because I have no need to say anything detrimental about it, which I do not do willingly. At one point in his life, Kolb did something that not many other government officials do. Most of them retire when they no longer want to do their duty; but he left his office, went to America, and got a job as an ordinary worker, first in a brewery and then in a bicycle factory. Based on the experiences that this government official had, he then wrote a book: “Als Arbeiter in Amerika” (As a Worker in America).

The book contains a remarkable sentence. It reads, for example: “When I used to meet someone on the street who wasn't working, I would say, ‘Why isn't the bum working?’ Now I knew differently: And now I know something else about many things as well; now I know that even the most terrible affairs of life still look quite good in the study.” That is a confession that deeply characterizes the social conditions of the time. A man who has emerged from our intellectual life, who has been entrusted with human destiny for many years — for as many years as are necessary to bring it to the government act — knows nothing of human labor, that is, he knows nothing of human life. He must first create a destiny for himself in order to know something of the life he is to govern, in which he is to be active from the leading classes. He must first, in order to know something of this life, get himself hired as a laborer and then come to completely different views of life.

Does this example, which could truly be multiplied, not indicate how our intellectual life, from which the leading people emerge, has become alien to the lives of the broad masses? The broad masses have seen, in the necessities of their bodies and souls, how the leading classes conduct economic life. They have seen that something is wrong, that these leading classes do not have the necessary spirit to guide economic life. Today the question arises: what needs to be different?

And in many other respects, one can still see how alien the leading class has become over the last few centuries from what should have been done to avoid drifting into a catastrophe. In the most serious and dignified manner, the leading circles discussed all kinds of beautiful things, such as charity, brotherhood among men, the way man must be good in general, and the like. But they had no connection with real life. At most, they would bring up the subject for discussion. Such an enquiry from the mid-19th century is not so insignificant today. It was initiated by the English government at the time among mine managers. The people who talked about human existence in their well-heated rooms should have experienced the coal they were talking about. They should have realized that the coal they were discussing their advanced morality and advanced intellectual life with had been brought up through mine shafts into which children of nine, eleven, thirteen years of age were sent underground before day, before the rising of the sun, and only came up again at night, so that the poor children almost never saw the light of day. It was easy to talk about human goodness and neighborly love in the context of the coals that were mined in this way. And many similar stories could be told. And the question must be asked: Did such events inspire the leading circles of humanity to really intervene in social life? Some people will reply today: Yes, but many things have improved. But to that I would say: What has improved has improved not because of the initiative of the ruling class, but because of the hard struggle of those who have suffered under these conditions.

These are the things that need to be brought to our attention today. We need to focus on what the worker, who works from morning till evening, can see at most from the outside when he passes our universities, our secondary schools. He is only familiar with what goes on in primary schools, and even there only what he can experience. He does not know how the objectives of primary education are determined from above, he only sees that those who cannot lead today's economic life emerge from these institutions.

This is the first aspect of the social question. Despite all the praise of our intellectual life, we have no intellectual life that is up to the great tasks of the time.

Let us look at economic life. When the social movement arose, we often heard the leading circles dismiss this social movement with the words: They want to divide. But what comes out of the division? Then everyone gets very little. — Then this objection fell silent; because on the one hand it is very true, but on the other hand it is very stupid. Recently, however, it has been cropping up again and again. But these things are not the point. Anyone who looks into the particular structure of our economic life today knows that the physical and mental misery of the broad masses of the proletariat has arisen from completely different causes. He knows that the inadequate development of intellectual life has not been understood in terms of bringing an ever-increasing technical activity in economic life into such a form that every person can have a dignified existence in it.

Of course, it has often been rightly pointed out that the modern social movement has emerged through modern technology, through machines, through soul-destroying capitalism. But it has been forgotten that all that has emerged could not be mastered by the spiritual life as it developed.

Why is that so? With the advent of the machine, industrialism and capitalism, a certain tendency took hold of humanity, which expressed itself in the fact that it was considered progress to have the state absorb the spiritual life as far as possible. Nationalization of the spiritual life was seen as great progress. And today you still meet with the sharpest prejudices if you object to this nationalization of the spiritual life. Those who have their sympathies in today's intellectual life point out with a certain pride how much further one has come with the spirit than in the old, dark Middle Ages. Well, we certainly do not want the Middle Ages back. Not back, but forward we want to go. But another question must be raised. It is said that in the Middle Ages intellectual life, especially science, followed in the train of theology or the Church. Today we have to ask: Whose train does present-day intellectual life follow – or perhaps something else? Here is another example, which could be multiplied not only a hundredfold but a thousandfold. Again, I may speak of a person whom I hold in high esteem because I am convinced that he was an important naturalist. At the same time, he was the Secretary General of a learned society that is at the forefront of German intellectual life. In one of his well-delivered speeches, he wanted to express what these German scholars, who have the great honor of being members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, consider their highest honor. When something like this is described, one would naturally like to point out an historical fact that is not insignificant. This Berlin Academy was always something that could, in a sense, intellectually express the impulses of the Hohenzollerns. A Hohenzollern of the 18th century was once faced with the necessity of appointing a president to his Academy of Sciences – I am not telling you a fairy tale, but an historical fact – and he believed he was honouring this Academy of Sciences most by giving it his court jester as president. But the great scholar of the late 19th century says that the learned gentlemen of the Berlin Academy consider it a great honor to be the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns.

We must look at such things as symptoms of the times. We must look at what intellectual life has become in its dependence on state power and the capitalist power associated with it. For if one can grasp inner impulses not out of some prejudice but out of the necessities of life, out of reality, then one will say, contrary to all the prejudices of the time, that intellectual life can only regain its strength if it is detached from state life, if it is left to its own devices. Everything that lives in spiritual life, especially the school system, must be handed over to its self-administration, from the highest level of the administration of spiritual life to the teacher of the lowest school level. In the administration of spiritual life, nothing but the forces of this spiritual life itself can be decisive. Those who are active in this spiritual life and experience it inwardly must form the body that administers this spiritual life and puts it completely on its own feet.

This is the first point of what is here called the threefold social organism. Such a spiritual life will be able to relate to life in a completely different way than the antisocial spiritual life in which we have gradually found ourselves, and from which it seems we have no desire to escape.

Someone who really has experience in this field is well placed to speak about it from that experience. For many years I taught at the Workers' Educational School in Berlin, founded by Liebknecht. So I know how to find the sources of a spiritual life that is not the preserve of a privileged class and represents a luxury spiritual life, but from which one can speak to all people who have the urge to achieve a dignified existence for soul and body. And I know something else from this practice of my life. I know how the workers understood me, always understood me better when I spoke to them from a free spiritual life that is there for all people, not for a privileged class. Because the workers believed that they had to go along with this or that, there were also times when I was led to guide the workers through museums or similar institutions, through sites where the evidence of a culture could be seen that existed only for a few, that did not represent a folk culture, a folk spiritual life. There I saw how the gulf also existed in the spiritual and mental life and how people basically could not really take in inwardly what had been created on the soil of a culture for a few. This is a misconception that many people still subscribe to today. They believe that they are promoting the education of the people when they throw chunks of what has been created at universities, secondary schools and other educational institutions from our culture, which is only born out of the social sentiments of a few. What has been done to promote such popular education! Public libraries, adult education colleges, public theaters, and so on. But we shall never get rid of the error which consists in believing that what is intellectually demanded by the emotional life of a secluding minority can be transplanted into the broad masses of the people. No, the time demands a spiritual life which embraces everybody in a social way. But this can only come into being when those who are to take part in it, with all their feelings, with all their social foundations, form a unity with those who create this spiritual life; when they are not thrown scraps, but when the whole mass of the people works uniformly in a spiritual way. But for this to happen, the spiritual life must be freed from state and capitalist constraints. Naturally, in a short lecture I cannot present all the arguments – not even all that is contained in my book on these key points of the social question – that could be adduced in favor of the necessity of detaching intellectual life, especially the school system, from the state and economic life and placing it on its own feet. But this is the first requirement for the threefold social order: a spiritual life that develops out of itself.

There is no need to fear such a spiritual life. There is no need to fear even if one has a low opinion of people, perhaps to the effect that they will fall back into the old illiterate state, or the like, if parents are free to send their children to school or leave them out without state coercion. No, the proletariat in particular will become more and more aware of what it owes to school education. And it will not leave its children out of school, even if it is not forced to send its children to school, but has to send them there of its own free will. And in particular, the advocate of the comprehensive school need not fear that a free spiritual life will be disturbed by the school. Nothing else can arise than the unified school if the free spiritual life is promoted.

That is what needs to be said first about the separation of spiritual life from state and economic life.

The second area of life that needs to be considered when studying today's social question is the legal life. People have developed the most diverse views about this legal life. But anyone who is able to observe and feel this legal life from reality says to himself: to give definitions or scholarly explanations of the law is just as absurd as trying to give scholarly instructions about what blue and red colors are. One can talk about blue and red colors with anyone who has a healthy eye. But about the sense of right, about the right that every human being has because he is a human being, one can talk to every awakened human soul. And with awakened human souls, with ever more awakened human souls, one is dealing with the modern proletariat.

With regard to this legal basis of life, however, modern humanity, insofar as it belongs to the ruling circles, has had a strange experience. These ruling circles could not help but spread a certain democracy over life. They needed a skillful proletariat to stage their capitalist interests, a proletariat that received certain soul forces. The old patriarchal life was of no use in the modern capitalist economy. But now something extremely unpleasant turned up for such a one-sided, capitalist democracy. You see, the human soul has the peculiarity that when you develop individual abilities and powers in it, then others will automatically come to the fore. Thus, the leading mankind wanted to develop only those soul powers that make workers able to work in factories. But it turned out that the souls awoke from the old patriarchal conditions, and that in them especially the awareness of human rights awoke. And then they looked into the modern state, which was supposed to embody the law. They asked themselves: Is this the soil in which the law really flourishes? And what did they find? Instead of human rights, class privileges and class disadvantages. And from this arose what is called the modern class struggle of the proletariat, which is nothing more or less than the great, justified demand for a dignified existence for all people.

This is the second aspect of the social question, the legal question. Its true significance cannot be recognized without also considering the third aspect, the economic question. Two things have seeped into economic life that simply do not belong there. These are capital and human labor, whereas economic life should only include what takes place on the goods market. I think that recent years, and especially the present, could teach people very clearly that the most important thing in the proletarian social movement is the proletarian himself. But today, as things are, the proletarian man cannot be judged by someone who, because the times suggest it, deigns to talk about the proletariat based on a variety of ideas. No, only someone whose destiny has led him to think with the proletariat and feel with the proletariat can judge these things. You have to have seen for yourself how, over decades, the proletarian world came together in the hours that could be wrested from the evening after hard work to educate itself about the economic movement of the new era, about the meaning of labor, of capital, about the meaning of commodity consumption and production; you have to have seen what an enormous need for education developed in the proletarian people, while, on the other side of the divide, within the higher classes, people visited their theaters and devoted themselves to many other activities, and at most managed to look down from the stage at the proletarian misery. Then the proletarian developed; he developed out of his spiritual life. And anyone who says today that the proletarian question is merely a question of bread and stomach must be given the answer: It is a shame that it has come to this, that the proletarian question has become a bread-and-butter question, that people did not look at something else earlier, namely, that the proletarian's entire striving has given rise to the demand for a dignified existence, for an existence in which he does not have to allow his body and soul to wither. For all proletarian demands have ultimately emerged from this, not from a mere bread-and-stomach issue. But while the proletarian was trying to come to his senses, while he was dealing with the economic systems of modern times, he developed an awareness of his own position as a human being in this human life. From his point of view, he was able to look at the way of life of the leading circles. He was told that history was a divine world order, or a moral world order, or the world order of the idea. He saw only that the ruling circles, within their world order, lived as the surplus value that he had to produce allowed them to live. That is why the words of the Communist Manifesto struck so deeply into the minds of the proletarians and made them aware of their situation. Despite all the progress of modern times, despite all the so-called newer freedoms, the proletarian is condemned to sell his labor power like a commodity on the labor market and to have it bought. This gave rise to the demand: The days are over when a person can sell or buy a part of himself. His feelings, which he perhaps could not always express clearly, led the proletarian back to ancient times, to the times of serfdom. And he saw how the purchase of his labor power has remained from those ancient times. For nothing else but this lies in the wage relationship. He said to himself: Goods belong on the market. You take the goods to the market, sell them and go back with the proceeds. I must sell my labor power to the employer, but I cannot go to him and say, “There is my labor power for so and so much money, and then I will go away.” I must deliver myself! — You see, as a human being, you must go with your labor power. That is what the proletarian perceives as an existence unworthy of a human being. |

The big question arises: What has to happen so that labor can no longer be a commodity? People today, insofar as they belong to the leading and guiding circles, basically give little thought to labor. These people open their wallets and pay with banknotes of a certain denomination. Whether they ever stop to consider that in the bills they give, or perhaps cut up into coupons, there is a decision to appropriate so many laborers from the proletariat, that is the big question. In any case, they do not give in to thoughts strong enough to intervene in social life.

The point is that human labor cannot be compared in price to any other commodity; that human labor is something quite different from a commodity. Human labor must be removed from the economic process. And it cannot be removed unless economic life is regarded as a part of the social organism, separate from the actual legal or state organism, from the political organism. Then what I would like to make clear to you by means of a comparison can occur. Economic life borders on the natural foundation on the one hand. You cannot manage a closed economic area in any way you like. You can use the soil by technical means or the like. But within certain limits you have to submit to the natural foundation. Imagine a number of large landowners, i.e. capitalists in their own right, who would say: If we are to achieve this balance, or even a better one, we need a hundred rainy days in summer, with sunny days in between, and so on. This is a complete plate, of course, but it does draw our attention to the fact that, on the one hand, we cannot change the natural foundations; we cannot demand, through our economic life, that the forces of nature in the ground prepare the wheat grain in a particular way. We must submit to the forces of nature; they stand beside economic life. On the other hand, economic life must be limited by the life of the law, that is to say, just as little as the forces of nature depend on the economic situation on the goods market, so little must human labor depend on the economic situation on the goods market. Human labor must be taken out of economic life like a force of nature and placed on the ground of the law. When it is placed on the legal ground, then everything in which one person is equal to another, in which only real human rights develop, in which labor law can also develop, can develop on this legal ground. The measure, type and time of work will be determined before the worker enters the economic process. Then he will face the one who, as we shall see in a moment, will not be the capitalist but the labor manager, the spiritual co-worker, as a free human being.

No matter how good the words may be about the so-called employment contract, as long as it is a wage contract, it can only lead to the dissatisfaction of the worker. Only when contracts can no longer be concluded for labor, but only for the joint production of the labor manager and the manual laborer, when a contract can only be concluded for the joint product, will a dignified existence for all parties arise from it. Then the worker will stand vis-à-vis the labor manager as a free partner. That is what the worker is basically striving for, even if he still cannot form a clear idea of it today. This is the real economic issue for the proletariat, the real economic demand: the liberation of labor power from the economic cycle, the establishment of the right of labor power within the second link of the three-part social organism, the legal basis.

And on this legal basis, another thing must be given a new form. This is precisely the thing that, when it comes to its reorganization, still makes today's people look very, very puzzled, namely the reorganization of capital. With regard to private property, people today think socially at least to a certain extent, and in fact in the area that seems to them to be the least difficult, in the spiritual area. For in the intellectual field, at least in principle, something social applies in relation to ownership. No matter how clever or talented a person is, he certainly brings his abilities with him through birth, but what we achieve that is socially valuable, intellectually as well, we achieve it by being within society, through society. In the intellectual field this is recognized by the fact that, at least in principle, nothing of what one produces intellectually, and from which one also receives the benefit, belongs to the heirs for thirty years after death. The time could be shorter, but at least it is recognized in principle that what is intellectual property must become the property of the general public at the moment when the individual with his individual abilities is no longer there to administer it. Intellectual property must not be transferred in an arbitrary manner to those who then have nothing more to do with its creation.

Now you say today that it is an historical requirement that it must become similar to material capital in the future! Tell that today to people who are within the capitalist education, then you will see what kind of perplexed faces they make! Nevertheless, one of the most important demands of the present is that capital should no longer be placed in the social process in the same way as it is today. The point is that in the future, everyone must be able to manage the means of production in a particular field based on their individual abilities. And the capital is actually the means of production. It is in the worker's own interest to have a good spiritual leader as a manager; because this is the best way to apply one's work. The capitalist is then just a fifth wheel on the car, he is not necessary at all. That is what must be realized. It is therefore necessary that in the future the means of production in a particular economic sector or for a cultural purpose are raised; but since the individual abilities of the person or group of people who have raised the means of production no longer justify personal ownership, these means of production , as I have shown in my book The Essential Points of the Social Question, must now pass to quite different people, not to the heirs, but to quite different people who now have the greatest ability to manage these means of production only in the service of the general public.

Just as blood circulates in the human body, so in the future the means of production, that is, capital, will circulate in the community of the social organism. Just as blood must not accumulate in a healthy organism, but must flow through the entire body, fertilizing everything, so in the future capital must not accumulate in any one place as private property. Rather, when it has served its purpose in one place, it must pass to whoever can manage it best. In this way, capital is divested of the function that has led to the greatest social damage today.

But the very clever people who speak from a capitalist point of view rightly say: All economic activity consists in giving up existing goods so that goods can be obtained in the future. That is quite right; but if we are to manage in this way – that is, by means of the past, the seeds are laid for the economy of the future, so that the economy does not die – then capital must participate in what the properties of goods are. Again, today there are extremely puzzled faces when one speaks of these demands of the future. Real goods, however, have the peculiarity that they are consumed. In consumption, they gradually follow the path of all living things. Our present economic order has brought capital to the point where it does not follow the path of living things. All one needs to do is to have capital, and then this capital is torn out of the fate of everything else that is involved in the economic process. Aristotle already said that capital should not have any young, but not only does it have young, but the young grow up until they are large; one can state the number of years until the capital doubles if it is only left to itself. Other goods, for which capital is only a representative example, have the peculiarity that they either wear out or can no longer be used if they are not put to use at the right time. Capital must be forced to share the fate of all other goods, insofar as it is monetary capital. While our current economic life aims to double capital in a certain period of time, a healthy economic life would make mere monetary capital disappear in the same period of time, so that it would no longer be there. Today it is still considered terrible to tell people that after a reasonable period of time, rather than doubling in fifteen years, monetary capital should no longer exist, because what is contained in this capital must participate in the process of wear and tear. Of course, some of what is involved in saving or the like can be taken into account.

So today we are not faced with small accounts, but with large accounts. And we must have the courage to admit to these large accounts. Otherwise the social order, or rather the social disorder, the social chaos, will descend on us. People today are little concerned about the fact that they are basically dancing on a volcano. It is more in their interest to continue with the old as lightly as possible, while time demands of us not only to change some institutions, but to rethink and relearn right down to our very habits of thought.

When labor and capital are removed from the economic process, with capital flowing to the community and labor being returned to the right of the free human being, then the economic process consists only of the consumption, circulation, and production of goods. Then the economic process has only to do with the value of goods. And then, within this economic process, which as a member of the healthy social organism is now left to its own devices, something may come into being of which one can then say: production is not merely for the sake of production, but for the sake of consumption. Then those cooperatives and associations will arise that are formed from the professional guilds, but that are formed in particular from the consumers, together with the producers. Out of these corporations will arise what is today entrusted to the chance of the goods market. Today, something decides on the goods market that is completely removed from human thought and judgment: supply and demand. In the future, the corporation must decide what conditions the formation of prices and the value of goods from the goods market. In this way alone will a person produce so much that what is produced has the value of all the goods he needs for his needs until he has produced an equal amount of goods again. That will be a just economic life. That will be an economic life in which the price of one type of goods does not disproportionately outweigh the prices of the other types of goods. Today, when wages are still included in the economic process and the worker is not the free partner of the spiritual leader, today the situation still exists that within the economic process the worker, on the one hand, must repeatedly fight for an increase in his wages; on the other hand, the fact that a hole is closed opens another: wages increase, food becomes more expensive, and so on. This only happens in an economic process that is polluted by capital and wage relationships. In an economic process in which corporations, cooperatives, determine the value of goods, and not according to supply and demand, which are subject to chance, but rather based on reason. In such an economic process alone can every human being find a dignified existence. The masses of proletarians basically long for such an economic process; that is their true demand in economic life.

In some areas, this demand is already being more clearly recognized. Take, for example, the question of works councils, which has now been so distorted by legislation. If the works councils are to become what the proletarian really demands, they must not be allowed to trail behind the state in every direction, just as intellectual life used to, but must be able to develop a truly beneficial social activity within economic life. For this, however, economic life must be placed on its own ground; for this, something other than these works councils must come into being; for this, transport councils and other councils must come into being; these must arise out of economic life, and they will create constitutions out of economic experience.

I know that many people today say: Education does not yet prevail in economic life to achieve what we want to achieve. Such are the words of people who always speak of ideals so that they do not have to implement what is possible in reality. That is the talk of people for whom ideals are something that should not be aspired to, so that they do not need to strive for what is most immediate. He who knows that the knowledge that comes from experience, from practice, is infinitely more valuable than anything that can be carried down from above, also knows that such a works council should not be set up only for individual companies, but must be inter-company. The works councils must connect the individual companies with the very different companies, mediate the connection, they must develop into a works council, a transport council and an economic council. If this grows out of the economic life, then one will come to the fact that these councils are not there for mere decoration, but that they become the human factor, the figures of economic life itself. But that is what is needed.

What I call the threefold social order did not arise out of some clever idea, out of a grey theory, but out of a real observation of the necessities of life in the present and the future. And it is truly a pity that today there are so few people who are able to turn their eyes to this vital necessity, to reality itself, out of the spiritual life that has developed up to now. People today slander what is most practical by saying: it is ideology, it is utopia. What is actually at the root of this? Some say: the socialization of the means of production is necessary. I agree. But I also say: it is necessary to know the way to get there. Today I have only sketched out what I mean. We need not only goals today, but also the paths and the courage to take them. Many people tell me that what I say is difficult to understand. Well, to understand what I am saying, more is needed than what people are usually willing to expend for understanding. It is necessary to look into real life, not to judge life from some subjective demands. It is necessary to also rise up, to summon the inner courage to think radically in certain things, as our time demands of every alert human being.

However, in the last four to five years, I have seen that people have understood things that I have not understood. They have even put things that they claimed to understand, when they came from certain places, into beautiful frames so that they could always look at them. Things that came from the great headquarters and the like, but understanding had to be commanded first. No one can be ordered to understand what should be understood out of an inner courage to live. Now the time has come when people should no longer allow themselves to be ordered to understand, but must be able to gain a real judgment from their life experiences, from their unprejudiced observation of life, about what is necessary before it is too late.

But today, strange things are happening. I do not like to talk about personal matters, but today it is these personal matters that dominate life. In April 1914, I was obliged to express my judgment on the social situation in a small gathering in Vienna (and intentionally in Vienna; as you know, the catastrophe of the world war originated in Austria). At that time, it was not only the social situation of the proletariat, but the social question of the whole of Europe. I pointed out that the social situation in Europe was tending towards a malignant growth, and indeed the world war then arose from it. — I was obliged to summarize my judgment about this in the words — in April 1914, note the date: anyone who looks into our social conditions, how they have gradually developed can only come to a great cultural concern, because he sees how a carcinoma is developing in social life, a kind of cancer disease that must break out in the most terrible way in the near future.

So at that time I had to point out what world capitalism was driving people into in the near future. Anyone who said this at the time was, of course, denounced as an impractical idealist, a utopian, an ideologue, because the practitioners spoke quite differently at the time. What did the practitioners say about the general world situation? They did not speak of a cancer disease. They spoke much as the German Foreign Minister did to the enlightened gentlemen of the German Reichstag in the spring of 1914 – they must have been enlightened, because they had been appointed, after all: We are heading for peaceful times, because the general relaxation is making gratifying progress. We have the best relationship with Russia; the St. Petersburg cabinet is not listening to the press pack. Promising negotiations have been initiated with England, which will probably be concluded in the near future in favor of world peace. The two governments are in such a state that relations will become ever closer and more intimate. – Thus spoke the practitioner, who was not scolded for being an idealist. And the general relaxation of tensions progressed to such an extent that what followed was something we have all experienced so painfully. It can be quite a shock to hear something like what was said recently at the League of Nations conference, where people talked about all sorts of things out of old habits of thinking. The only thing they did not talk about in a way that was somehow appropriate was the greatest movement of the present, the social movement, which is the only one capable of founding a real league of nations.

Then, sometimes, out of old habits of thinking, very clever people give very particular answers. Recently in Bern, a very clever gentleman answered me - I never want to underestimate people's cleverness -: I cannot imagine that something special comes out of a threefold structure, everything must be a unity. Law cannot arise only on the political plane, and so on. What is necessary is that the law develops on the basis of the law, then economic life also has the law, then spiritual life has the law. And if you say that the unity of the social organism is being cut, then I say: that is not the issue for me! The issue is not to cut the horse in two, but to put the horse on its four legs. The point is not to cut up the social organism, but to put it on its three healthy legs, on a healthy legal life, a healthy economic life and a healthy spiritual life. Then this unity, which is worshipped today as an idol as a unified state, but which must be abandoned if socialism is wanted.

For more than a century, people have repeatedly spoken of humanity's great social ideal, of the greatest social impulses: equality, freedom, fraternity. Of course, very clever people of the 19th century have repeatedly proved that these ideals cannot be realized because they were only seen under the hypnosis of the unitary state; hence the contradiction. But today is the time when these ideals must be realized, when these three impulses of social life must be grasped. And they can only be realized in the threefold social organism. In the spiritual life, which should stand on its own ground, individual abilities must be developed as they do on the ground of freedom. In the field of law, that which makes every human being equal to every other human being must prevail, and by means of this law every adult person can, through himself or through his representative, regulate his relationship with other people, including his working relationship. And in the field of economic life, that true brotherhood must prevail which can only flourish in cooperatives, whether they be consumer or producer cooperatives.

In the tripartite social organism, freedom, equality and fraternity will prevail because it has three parts: freedom in the realm of spiritual life, equality in the democratic realm of legal life, and fraternity in the realm of economic life.

Today I have only been able to hint to you from individual points of view what needs to be considered in today's very serious times; what is most necessary to consider if one seriously wants to help to get out of confusion and chaos, so as not to get deeper into confusion and chaos. What is necessary today is not to think only of small changes, but to have the courage to admit to ourselves that today great reckonings are due. Anyone who can truly look with an alert soul at what is only just beginning today must say to himself: We will not have long to deliberate. Therefore, we had better take a path that can be embarked upon every day. And what is given by the threefold social organism can be taken up every day. Only those who want to delve deeper into the practice that brought us the world catastrophe will want to call what is truly practical an impractical idealism.

If healing is to occur in social life, it will be necessary to thoroughly abandon the superstitious idolization of practice, which is nothing more than brutal human egoism. We must commit ourselves to an idealism that is not a one-sided idealism, but a true practice of life. Those who are sincere about our time will ask themselves today: how do I get on the path to a remedy for what we face as social damage? And it would be desirable for more and more people to come to this path before it is too late. And it could be too late very soon.

Closing words

After a discussion in which mainly party and trade union officials had spoken, Rudolf Steiner took the floor again:

I would have preferred it if the speakers had addressed the issues I had raised. Then we could have made the discussion fruitful. But that did not happen. So I will just point out a few things and draw attention to them.

Some speakers have said that nothing new has been presented in my considerations. Well, I know very well the development of the social movement. And anyone who claims that the essentials of what has been presented today from the experiences of the whole reorganization of the social situation through the world catastrophe is not something new should realize that they are saying something absolutely untrue. In reality, the situation is quite different: The speakers have not heard the new thing. They have limited themselves to hearing the few things that were taken for granted because they were correct when they were put forward as a critique of the usual social order. They have been accustomed for many years to hearing this and that as a slogan: that is what they heard. But what was said in between, about the threefold social order, about what can be achieved in every respect through this threefold social order, about that the speakers have heard absolutely nothing. And that is probably why they remained silent in their discussions about what they had not heard. I understand that. But I also understand that a fruitful discussion cannot actually come out of such a thing.

For example, we heard a speaker who, as if he had not experienced the last five to six years, talked at length about the old theories that have been discussed so many times before this catastrophe. He dutifully repeated all the theories about surplus value and so on, which are certainly correct but have been advanced countless times. He just forgot that we live in a completely, completely different time today. He forgot that, for example, only a few months before the German surrender, highly respected socialist leaders were still saying: When this world catastrophe is over, the German government will have to take a completely different position towards the proletariat than before. The German rulers will have to take the proletariat into account in all government actions and in all legislation in a completely different way than before. But the Socialists also said: the Socialist parties will have to be taken into account.

Well, things turned out differently. Those in power were plunged into the abyss, and the parties were there. Today they face a completely different world situation. In the face of this new world situation, however, one should not simply ignore new ideas and only listen to the parties that are naturally heard because they have always been considered as long as there has been a social movement. Instead, one should acquire the ability to respond to what is most urgently needed in the present day. Otherwise we face the great danger that basically has always existed in the old, customary world order: when something came along that looked at facts, that was taken from reality, it was declared to be ideology; it was declared to be philosophy, that it had nothing to do with reality, and that it paved the way for reaction. It would be the worst if the Socialist Party were to fall into a kind of reactionary paralysis, if it were unable to move forward with the facts speaking so loudly.

That is what matters today. Marx coined a nice phrase after he got to know the Marxists – it happens to many people who strive to bring something truly new into the world: As for me, I am not a Marxist. And Marx always showed – I am just reminding you of the events of 70/71 – how he learned from these events. He always showed that he was able to keep pace with the times. Today, when the time is ripe, he would certainly find the possibility of recognizing the real solution to the social question in the threefold social order. There is constant talk of new paths, and when a new path is shown, which admittedly takes real courage, it is said: No path is shown, only a goal is shown. One would like to ask: Has anyone already thought of this way, which makes it necessary for a kind of liquidation government to come into being? That is what is in fact very unusual for people, given their habits of thinking. The old governments, including the Socialist government, think of nothing but that they will be the beautiful, brave continuation of what the government used to be. What we need is for this government to keep only the initiative in the center, the supervision of the security service, hygiene and the like, and for it to become a liquidation government on the left and right: namely, by leaving intellectual life free, so that it passes into independent administration, and by putting economic life on its own feet.

This is not a theory, not a philosophy, this is a pointer to something that must be done. And for this to be done, it is first necessary to understand its necessity. This means gradually abandoning the old habit of only wanting to listen to what one likes and not wanting to listen to what is unknown.

When speakers appear who get tangled up in strange practical contradictions and don't even realize it, they show how actually impossible it is to find a practical way. One speaker managed to say today: Real political power still rests on economic foundations today. And then, after adding something – it is no longer so noticeable – he said: The first thing is that we gain political power in order to conquer economic power. So on the one hand, he declaimed: He who has economic power also has political power. And immediately afterwards, after a few sentences, they say: We must first have political power, then we will also get economic power. With such speakers, however, it will not be possible to take practical action. You can only take a practical path if you are able to think straight and not confuse the paths of thought.

You will not get anywhere by rigidly adhering to any objections, such as: The tendency towards laziness makes it necessary to force people into a unified school. All those who were in power in the past have put forward similar arguments. We have seen people in government who were truly no smarter than those they governed. But they still managed to put it this way: if we don't force people to do this or that, they won't do it voluntarily.

It is a strange phenomenon that such things are now also coming to light on socialist soil. What is really needed is the very thing that is at issue here: the opportunity to develop an understanding of what is necessary, not to stick to long-established theories and the like. That is what is always called for. When people say: the power must be seized!, they mean a gray 'theory'. Because once you have seized power, you also have to know what to do with that power. You can't get ahead any other way. Seize power – if you are in power and you don't know what to do, then all that power is for nothing. The point is that just before you come to power, you know clearly and distinctly what you are going to do with that power.

If, on the one hand, it has been said that the revolution of November 9 was a success, then it might just as well have been a failure. And if, on the other hand, it is said that foreign countries view the revolution as a fraud, this is precisely because power has been seized and those in power do not know what to do with it. But now it must finally be known what is to be done with power. But if everyone sticks to the old party opinions, then they may call for unity. There is one method of calling for unity, and that is to really see where the damage is. In this way, the threefolding impulse seeks to bring about unity. It is simply objectively defamatory to say that a new party or a new sect should be founded. It is nonsense. And if the resolution has been adopted by numerous assemblies, I am completely reassured that this resolution will never be complied with. If it were complied with, the result would be that the current rulers would very soon be shown the door. There is no need to fear that some kind of unity might be disturbed. But there is another way to destroy unity: to insist on one's principles and then to say: if you don't follow me, then we are not united. That is also a way of preaching unity when you actually mean: we can only be united if you follow me. Quite a few people actually think that today.

As I said, I am sorry that I cannot go into details, because actually not a single speaker in the discussion really touched on the issues that were raised in my lecture. It was even said at the end that I had philosophized. With such philosophizing, as this speaker did, one can indeed call everything a fruitless philosophy. But whether one can really arrive at something that can help with such philosophizing, as developed by the last speaker, is very much in question.

What is given in this threefold social organism was first given as an impulse during the terrible catastrophe of the war, when I believed that the right time had come. At that time, when we were still far from the monster of the Brest-Litovsk Peace, it seemed to me to be just the right thing to do, in contrast to what actually happened, to seek a balance in the East, starting from this impulse of threefolding. Nobody understood this. That is why what was subsequently triggered by the Brest-Litovsk Peace happened. Today it is really important that people are found who do not do it the way all those to whom this threefold social order was spoken about during the war, at that time of course with reference to foreign policy.

In the next few days, a brochure will be published about the guilt for the war. The world will learn what actually happened in Germany in the last days of July and the first days of August 1914. It will then be seen how the great misfortune befell us because we did not think for ourselves, because we let the authorities think for us, because we were satisfied to let the authorities do the thinking for us. That is what led to the fact that on July 26, instead of leading to a reasonable policy, politics had reached the zero point of its development. The world must learn about these things one day. It will learn about them in the next few days through the memoirs of the most important person who was active in those days, in July/August 1914. Then we will see what has been missed because only some people in authority thought in their own way, and that the others basically had their convictions dictated to them.

Now, we have heard the matter many times. The war profiteers were followed by the revolution profiteers. But there was also another consequence. The war talkers were followed by the revolution talkers. And the ratio of revolution talkers to war talkers is roughly the same as that of revolution profiteers to war profiteers.

We have to get beyond the chatter. And we have to get beyond the fact that we cannot be guided politically by any authority, whether they are socialist or other personalities. We have to become discerning people. We cannot become discerning people if we sweep aside everything that can really be based on the demands of the day.

I do not go into such things that have been brought up and that are nothing more than absolute distortions of what has permeated my considerations. The fact that I want to bridge the contradictions with goodwill is an objective slander. I certainly did not speak of bridging the contradictions with goodwill. I spoke of the institutions that are to be brought about. What does the independence of intellectual life, economic life, and legal life have to do with goodwill? It has to do with the objective description of what is to come.

I agree with anyone who says that first of all people want power, but I am also quite clear about the fact that whoever has the power must know how to use it. And if we just want to rush forward and leave the unenlightened masses behind, then we will not only end up in the same conditions, but in much worse conditions than those that already existed.

You can find something else philosophically and feel tremendously practical when you say: The French are exhausted, they can't give us bread, England is also emaciated by the war and can't give us bread, America is too expensive for us. But we can get bread from Russia! —- Well, for the time being the English have much more bread than the Russians themselves, despite all the false reports. The claim that we can expect bread from Russia is one that is not based on fact.

What is important is that we now truly understand the situation as it is. That we say to ourselves: we were unable to socialize with the old intellectual life, we need a new intellectual life. But that can only be the intellectual life detached from the constitutional state. We need a foundation on which labor is withdrawn from the struggles. That can only be the independent state under the rule of law. And we need a balancing of the value of goods, and that can only happen on the basis of an independent economic life. These are things that one can really want. These are things that are not just revolutionary phrases. These are things that, if one has the courage to bring them about, truly want to bring about a very different state of the world than it is now.

I believe that if you think about it long enough, you will come to understand what is contained in the threefold social order. And it can be introduced in a relatively short time. Now, when this healthy threefold organism is in place, our circumstances will be very much revolutionized. When the world moves towards the introduction of the threefold social organism, then we shall have no need to 'thunder' about world revolution, for it will then take place in an objective way. Thunder is not what it is about. What it is about is finding germinal thoughts that can develop into real social fruits.

Today, however, we do not need a lot of talk, but we do need to agree on what needs to be done. We are not dealing with ideologies, utopias or philosophies in the threefold social organism, but with something that can be done, that is a plan for real action, not a description of a future state, but a plan for work. We need a plan for every house, we need it for social reorganization. Those who are always cutting back, be they socialists or other people, will not lead to this, but only those who are inclined to really move forward. I fear that those who have heard “nothing new, only old” today will not lead us out of chaos, but into it.

We want to take a serious approach today to the acceptance of that which is so unusual, so new, that it is not even heard when it is said, but rather find its own phrases. Today, new habits of thought are necessary, a change in thinking is necessary. Humanity must appeal to new habits of thought, to new ways of thinking, before it is too late. And I say it again: if humanity does not have this inner courage, it could very easily soon be too late.

When people see the present distress and misery, they ask what has caused it, and usually they look for the causes in external circumstances. They will first look back at the painful years that have passed, four to five years. Perhaps he will also gradually become aware that what has been so painfully experienced in the last four to five years has been preparing itself over a long period of time, through decades, indeed through centuries of recent human development, just as a thunderstorm prepares itself through the sultriness of the whole day, without its formation being noticed, and then discharges itself. But even those people who look further back in this way to the causes and reasons for our present plight and our misery in this age, they will look more or less at external circumstances. They will also think of appearances when it comes to getting out of the confusion and chaos of this age, of external measures and institutions.

To a great extent, this view is correct. I myself have tried to express the extent to which this is the case, in accordance with my own convictions, in the lecture I was allowed to give here in Ulm a few weeks ago on social issues. But there is another side to this way of looking at things. We need only be attentive to what is a significant contemporary phenomenon in our present time with regard to the inner human life, the human soul life. In line with what I just mentioned, we are rightly striving for a more social organization of the external conditions of life than has been granted to humanity in the last three to four centuries. But is it not noticeable that we are striving towards this social organization from a very strange human state of mind? Do we not notice that basically human souls in the present are permeated with antisocial drives, with antisocial instincts, with little possibility of mutual understanding? And it is out of these antisocial states of mind, and all the more so because they are present, that we must strive for a more social organization of external life than that which the antisocial instincts of our present human life had developed during the last three to four centuries. If we consider the question from this point of view, we find that these antisocial tendencies of the present time are actually connected with the fact that we have lost the way to the innermost core of man's being, the way to that innermost core of being that every human being actually senses within himself, even if more or less brightly or only instinctively and obscurely: the supersensible human being. However strange it may sound, people today do not know exactly what their deeper, darker soul craves. It longs for a realization of the supersensible essence of the human being. And in the difficulties that our age in particular is experiencing in advancing to a satisfactory realization of this innermost human nature - in these difficulties lies much of what then expresses itself externally in confusion and chaos, as little as people want to admit this even today. Many people, however, think that the question I am talking about should be answered in a completely different way from the one I will give you tonight.

Since I have to discuss this question from the point of view of anthroposophical spiritual science, I will not be able to answer it in the convenient way that is sought by many people today, and which is popular in the broadest circles of humanity. When people today are told about the Mountains of the Moon and how one informs oneself about them through physical instruments and physical measures, they believe that acquiring knowledge about the Mountains of the Moon is a complicated matter. The human being overcomes himself and admits that one cannot penetrate to knowledge of, say, the Moon Mountains or the moons of Jupiter or the like in a completely comfortable way. But when it comes to the supersensible world, when it comes to the spiritual existence of the human being himself, the broadest circles today still behave quite differently. They find it too difficult to speak in the way I will have to speak to you today. Even today the widest circles say: Better than this apparent science is childlike confession or childlike belief in the Bible to enter the supersensible worlds. They insist on that which they find comfortable, on the childlike simplicity of the belief in confession or in the Bible, when it is a matter of the highest thing to which man can aspire on the path of the soul, and they reject that which does not lead man along this path in such a comfortable way. But even today people do not see certain inner connections that exist between this striving for comfortable spiritual paths and between our anti-social instincts and the difficulties of getting out of these anti-social instincts. If people realized the connection between what they have been told and believed from certain quarters: that you can seek the paths to the supersensible through childlike, simple creeds, and if they realized the connection between this assertion and this belief and between what is expressed today in terms of anti-social impulses, then one would certainly learn to think differently about what the widest circles today find to be a 'convenient way into the supersensible worlds'. 'But it is not out of some kind of intellectual quirk that spiritual science shows modern man other ways today, but it shows these ways because it feels it has an obligation to do so in view of the needs and tasks of present-day humanity. If present-day humanity were to recognize itself in its very depths, it would say to itself: With regard to supersensible striving, we can no longer be satisfied with the old ways. This lives today as a longing in many souls, and anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to meet this longing.

As already mentioned, people today do ask more or less clearly or more or less unconsciously about the relationship between soul and body; if they have not already come so far as to deny everything of a soul nature, because doubt has always arisen in response to this question, doubt that has wearied them. But what does the modern person fundamentally know about soul and body? He observes the body in such a way that he applies his senses, his external physical mind, or, for that which he cannot directly learn through the senses and the mind, he resorts to natural science, which, through its investigations, is supposed to tell him what the laws are, what the inner nature of this human physical body is. On the other hand, man inwardly perceives that which he calls thinking, feeling and willing. This becomes an inner experience for him. To this thinking, feeling and willing he also attaches certain inner longings, desires and hopes, he attaches the belief that this inner life, living in thinking, feeling and willing, has not only the temporary significance for the world that the life of the physical body has. But then the question arises for the human being that gives rise to the great doubts: What is the relationship between what I perceive inwardly as soul in me, as thinking, feeling and willing, and what I see outwardly in myself and in others as the outer physical body, the laws and essence of which science seeks to explain to me? And if the human being cannot explain this relationship between the soul and the body to himself, then he may well turn to those who, based on certain scientific foundations, have the opportunity to investigate this relationship more deeply. And lo and behold, today's man, who is so eager to have everything explained to him by scientific authority, must then realize that in this question he can be helped little by the scientists he so seeks. If he takes anything at hand in which the researchers in this field have expressed themselves, he will usually find that they say about this question just as uncertainly as he carries within himself. All kinds of hypotheses and conjectures can be found. But something that seizes the human being in such a way that, if only they can truly take a position on it without prejudice, they might get a sense of the truth, is rarely found today. The task of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is to find this.

But we cannot advance along the same paths by which we arrive at external science to that which I must now speak of as a spiritual science, as a real spiritual science. Imagine someone telling you about the paths of research they have taken in the chemical or physical laboratory, in the clinic, to research external nature. You would usually hear from such a researcher, who can justifiably believe that he has become an expert in his field, that he has gone his research ways with a certain calm, with a certain inner equanimous soul mood. There is not much excitement to be found on today's research paths.

But anyone who wants to tell you about the path he took to his insights into the supersensible human being cannot speak of such calmness, of such an inner, equanimous mood of the soul. If he is to tell you about what he went through to arrive at these insights, he will have to speak of inner struggles, of inner soul-searching, of difficult efforts, of repeatedly standing at the precipice of doubt. He will have to tell you about what he had to overcome in abundance, what he had to go through to arrive at what provides information about the actual supersensible human core of being. For one only really enters upon the path to knowledge of the supersensible human being when one has familiarized oneself with everything I have already indicated: when doubts arise when considering the question of the relationship between body and soul, so that one that can only arise from a certain intellectual modesty – while most people today, in such matters, have not at all intellectual modesty, but on the contrary, terrible intellectual arrogance.

But if one really makes an effort with ordinary thinking, with all the ordinary powers of the soul that one otherwise has in life, to approach these questions about the nature of soul and body, then one gradually realizes that one must be modest, that one cannot approach these questions with ordinary human thinking. And gradually, through inner experience, through inner discovery, one comes to realize that with this ordinary human thinking and feeling, one's approach to the supersensible is comparable to the abilities of a five-year-old child when, for example, it is presented with a volume of lyric poetry. This child cannot do anything with the volume of poetry that corresponds to the essence of this volume of poetry. We must first develop his abilities further, then he can do something with the volume of poetry that corresponds to the essence of this volume of poetry. So we must say to ourselves with regard to the thinking abilities that we have for our ordinary lives, with regard to the powers of knowledge that we have for our ordinary lives: you cannot use them to recognize the actual essence of the world and your own existence; you are initially confronted with this essence of the world and this essence of your own existence in such a way that you can do with it as little as a five-year-old child can with a book of poetry.

Only when one has developed this mood in one's soul, when one has conquered intellectual modesty so that one says to oneself: You must not remain with the way you can think now, feel and will now - only then does one stand at the starting point of the path into the supersensible worlds. For anyone who has something to say about the supersensible worlds must not only speak about something different from the ordinary external sense world, but must speak in a different way. This means, however, that one can only become a spiritual researcher if one first takes into one's own hands the faculties of thinking and cognition that one has for ordinary, everyday life and for ordinary science. Just as a child is educated by others, and its abilities developed by others, so must one take one's own inner soul abilities, first of all one's thinking ability, into one's own hands and develop them further, from the point of view at which thinking comes naturally in life.

In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have described in detail the systematic structure of the thinking process by which man can take his thinking ability into his own hands and develop it further than it has been developed by ordinary life and ordinary science.

This evening, due to the limited time, I will only be able to present the fundamentals of the matter. I will only be able to show you how to further develop this thinking, how to take it into your own hands and how to advance it further and further. The following is a prerequisite for this: If you want to educate yourself about the external physical being of a person, as I said earlier, you should turn to natural science. Now, this natural science is not to be disparaged. The spiritual researcher fully recognizes the great triumphs of natural science in modern times, just as the natural scientist can only recognize them himself. He recognizes this natural science as justified; he is all the better a spiritual researcher the better he is able to appreciate the value and significance of natural science. But precisely for this reason the other side must also be stated: if one asks this natural science, it initially presents one with the limits of knowledge. You are all well aware that it is precisely the level-headed natural scientists who speak of such limits of knowledge. Certain concepts, certain ideas are presented to the person who asks about the nature of things, about power, matter, etc. These concepts change from time to time, but certain limits always remain, beyond which the natural scientist says: You cannot go. The natural scientist is right in his field if he stops at these limits. The spiritual researcher cannot do this. But he must not want to go beyond these limits through mere speculation or mere fantasy.

When the spiritual researcher approaches that which science cannot recognize and where it has driven the boundary posts for knowledge, there the great inner soul struggles begin for him, for the spiritual researcher. The spiritual researcher must fight inwardly with what the natural scientist presents as fixed boundary concepts. And here this struggle becomes a first great experience. He overcomes these limitations in his inner experience by struggling, and by overcoming them, a realization dawns on him with the experiences, which is important, fundamentally important for everything that is to lead to the knowledge of supersensible human nature. By devoting himself to this struggle with the limitations of natural knowledge, he realizes how peculiarly the human being is adapted to life. For the spiritual researcher must ask himself, from his experience, what prevents him from looking into the inner nature of things in a purely scientific way? There he discovers something most remarkable, I might say, something most distressing. If nature were transparent, if it did not set limits for us, then we human beings would not possess a quality in our life between birth and death that we absolutely need for our social existence in this life. If man could see into the inner nature of nature, he would have to do without the soul power of love! Everything we call love from person to person, what we call love and brotherly feelings from person to person, what glows in the soul when we approach another person socially, we could not have if nature did not set limits for our knowledge of nature.

This is a truth that cannot be proven logically. Just as little as one can logically prove that there is a whale or that there is no whale – one can only be convinced by seeing it with one's own eyes – so one cannot prove that one would have to do without love if knowledge of nature had no limits. But as an experience it presents itself to him who really struggles into spiritual knowledge. There you see what secrets our human existence holds. It is such a secret that man must pay for limited knowledge of nature by developing love. And vice versa: he must pay for his ability to love by initially having no unlimited knowledge of nature.

But this also shows us what the one who really wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, to which man himself with his innermost core of being belongs, has to overcome. One of the basic principles for the paths up to the supersensible human being and to the supersensible world in general is that one's ability to love, one's devotion to all beings in the world, must be greater than it is in ordinary life between birth and death, so that one does not lose love when one now tries to shape one's thinking more and more so that it becomes different from the way one thinks in ordinary life. It must be a preparation for the spiritual path of knowledge, to make oneself much, much more capable of love than one has to be for the ordinary social life. One gradually realizes that one actually only gets to know the world in one's full human nature as long as one is in the physical body, through love, through no other method of research.

But if you want to penetrate into the spiritual world, you must at the same time develop your thinking higher than it develops naturally in human nature. This is achieved by systematically applying certain inner soul activities, which in life are otherwise only applied incidentally, by forcing yourself to do so. Today I can only give you a small excerpt of what you will find described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” But I can at least hint at what this higher development of human thinking is based on.

You know that when something from outside stimulates us in some way, we become aware of it. We hear a sound and we are interested in what is happening in the direction of that sound. So being interested in something and turning our attention to it are inner soul activities that are usually stimulated in people from the outside world. What is important when entering the spiritual path of knowledge is that we apply such forces as the forces that lead to attention and interest in us, for example, by meditating on an idea for a very, very long time, as they say, by putting our soul completely into this idea. In the ordinary, natural course of life, attention and interest in this idea are lost. But if you deliberately immerse yourself in such an idea with all your soul, and remain in it, so that you maintain from within the attention that is in danger of fading, that you maintain from within the interest when it is in danger of fading, through the length with which you devote yourself to the idea - and if you keep doing this, then you invigorate your thinking; your thinking becomes something quite different from what it used to be. Then one comes indeed to a thinking that is full of inner activity, but in which one must also exert oneself, as one must exert oneself in an external manual labor. One comes to a thinking that relates to ordinary thinking as ordinary thinking relates to the thinking of a five-year-old child, for example, in relation to lyrical poems. But one comes to a kind of thinking of which one says to oneself: if one has achieved it, then one had to exert an inner strength in order to achieve it, which really took the physical, which also cooperates, so that one feels it like a fatigue from hard external work, to which one has devoted oneself for years. If one learns to recognize that one can work at something in one's soul that costs as much effort as chopping wood costs for me, then one comes to grasp the living thinking in one's soul, while ordinary thinking only accompanies external phenomena, external experiences. Think about how you actually think in ordinary life: you do your work in ordinary life, and your thinking runs along dreamily alongside this outer life. Try to make this thinking more strenuous by reading a difficult book, and you will notice that just when thinking wants to be inwardly active, it must tire, like any other activity. But what is developed from within through this activity must be pushed further and further with the thinking. When it is pushed further and further, one notices that a great change is taking place in thinking. Then one learns to recognize something of which one had no idea before: one learns to recognize that one lives in a thinking of which ordinary thinking is only a reflection, an image: one learns to know a thinking that lives inwardly, a thinking that is completely independent of the tool of the brain, of the tool of the body. However grotesque, however paradoxical, however insane it may appear to present-day humanity, in this way, which you will find described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, the human being can come to know very precisely: by thinking, by developing the soul activity of thinking, you live outside the body with your thinking, while ordinary thinking is tied to the instrument of the body, to the nervous system. But one also learns to recognize exactly how little the inner soul being, which one grasps in one's thinking, is bound to the instrument of the brain. For one does not develop this inner soul being in the first place, but one only gets to know it. I am not talking to you about something that is being developed anew today, but about the knowledge of the supersensible human being. One learns to recognize the great error to which ordinary natural science and external popular opinion about thinking succumb, especially in our materialistic age.

Natural scientific thinking says: the brain is the instrument of thinking. But that is an error, just as it would be an error if you were to see wagon tracks or the marks of human footsteps in a muddy country lane and then to reflect – let us assume for the moment – on the forces at work from below, from the earth, that have produced the wagon tracks or the marks of human footsteps. That would, of course, be foolish. You cannot see from the structure of the earth itself how the furrows were formed. You have to realize that a cart has driven there, that people have walked over it with their feet, that this has left an impression. In this way you come to see the error of science with regard to the human soul life when you really get to know thinking that is independent of the body. There you learn that what is in the brain as nerve furrows does not have the forces in the brain itself that produce the soul; rather, you learn that all these furrows are driven in — like furrows in soft earth driven in by carts and footsteps — that these furrows are dug in by soul activity independent of the body. And now you also understand the error that can arise in science. Such traces arise in the brain for everything that is engraved there; you can follow them all; but this did not arise from the body, it is engraved into the body.

But it is not always easy to grasp this active being. In order to get even a brief glimpse into this human thinking, which is independent of the body, one needs what could be called presence of mind, because it does not last long, such a glimpse of the spiritual into our ordinary perception. One can prepare oneself well – you will also find something about this in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – by developing in everyday life what can be called presence of mind, rapid orientation in situations and the ability to act quickly in a situation. If we develop this quality more and more, we prepare ourselves to see what can appear out of the spiritual, the supersensible world, and what we otherwise do not see because we do not have time to muster the necessary presence of mind while it occurs; because we do not have time to look at it before it is over. But if you really learn to look into the spiritual world in this way, if you learn to recognize what lives in the human being and can be grasped in this way through developed thinking, then you see not only into the ordinary human life of everyday life, but then a completely different perspective arises.

There is one thing that this spiritual knowledge does not have: it is not memorable in the ordinary sense. The one who wants to tell you something from the spiritual world must always create the conditions to see it. He cannot just develop a memory for his earlier spiritual vision. But even if that spiritual insight, I would like to say, passes quickly like a fleeting dream that is soon forgotten, it contains within itself a meaningful memory. And at this point something must be said that will naturally strike the people of the present time as highly peculiar. But it certainly did strike people as peculiar when they were told that there are not just glowing points up there, but countless worlds spread throughout space! Just as men centuries ago were slow to believe it, but became so accustomed to it that today it is a matter of course for them, so what the spiritual researcher presents as his experience through his developed thinking will still seem unusual today, but it will have to be a matter of course for the coming centuries. And one of the tasks of our time will be to develop people's understanding for such an expansion of human knowledge and human perception. In the moment when man has an inwardly living thinking and knows that with this thinking he is independent of the body, he looks back - while he cannot have the ordinary memory in this moment - to the spiritual-soul that he has gone through in a purely spiritual world before he united with the physical human body through birth or conception and thereby descended from a spiritual world into the sensual world. The view expands beyond the life one has been living since birth; life expands into the contemplation of the spiritual world from which we have descended to our physical existence.

This also gives a new meaning to our entire social life. In our social life, we relate to this or that person. We quickly develop an affinity for one person, while with another we do not find ourselves so quickly united in sympathy. The most diverse relationships arise with other people here in this life between birth and death. If, as a spiritual researcher, you learn to recognize life as I have just indicated, then you will find that what attracts you to one person and what more or less alienates you to another person – in short, what arises in your relationships with others – is the result of what we have lived through with other souls in another world before we descended to this physical existence. Everything we experience in the physical world is a reflection of experiences in the spiritual world. In this way, human spiritual endeavor in our time will be able to give rise to insight into the spiritual world from this physical world.

There may still be many people today who cannot relate to such a view. But one can still think about such people. When the first railroad was built in Germany, a council of physicians and other scholars were called together to decide whether or not to build railroads. These learned gentlemen delivered the verdict that railways should not be built because traveling would be harmful to health and only fools would want to travel in them. In any case, a high board wall would have to be erected so that those along whom the railroad passes would not get concussions. Today there are people who, figuratively speaking, believe that one gets a concussion when the spiritual researcher speaks of the insights of the supersensible world. But the development of time will overcome these prejudices as it has overcome other prejudices.

What I have described to you is one way of crossing over from the physical world into the superphysical world. One must struggle with the limitations of knowledge of nature. But one must also come to terms with another limitation if one is to enter the spiritual world and gain insights into the supersensible nature of the human being. Just as one must come to terms with the limitations of knowledge of external nature, one must also come to terms with the limitations of knowledge of one's own being.

A great many people despair of finding satisfaction for their inner soul life in their old religious traditions and turn to so-called mysticism, believing that if they delve deeper and deeper into their souls, their inner soul life, their human nature, will become clear to them. Many people believe that what they truly are as human beings can arise mystically. The spiritual researcher must also learn this limit. He must be able to be a mystic, just as he must develop knowledge of nature. But he must not stop with mysticism, just as he must not stop with knowledge of nature. He must learn that mere mysticism leads to nothing but illusions about the supersensible human being, but not to a real knowledge of this supersensible human being. A true spiritual researcher is truly not an illusionist. He does not succumb to any illusions about what he has to recognize as reality. Therefore, unlike the ordinary mystic, he does not set out to conjure up all kinds of fantasies from within himself. No, there he knows one thing again: by struggling with his own inner being, by going through his own personal struggle, he knows that what mystics find is basically nothing other than what has made an impression on their souls since birth. They may have only grasped it dimly, it may not have come to their perception quite clearly, but it has remained in their memory.

Scientific research has already made some very interesting observations in this regard. I will briefly share one with you that is recorded in scientific literature, but which could be multiplied a hundredfold, a thousandfold. A natural scientist passes a bookstore window. His eye falls on a book. And as he looks at the title of the book, he has to laugh. Just imagine, a naturalist has to laugh when he sees a serious book title! He cannot explain to himself why he has to laugh. Now he closes his eyes because he thinks he will be able to figure it out more quickly if he is not distracted by the external impression. By closing his eyes, he hears in the distance what he had not heard before, as long as he was distracted: a barrel organ. And by continuing his investigation, he realizes that the organ is playing a melody to which he once danced. At the time, it made no strong impression on him; he was more interested in the dancer, or even in the dance steps. The impression of the melody itself was weak at the time, but still strong enough to resurface in later life when the researcher hears the same melody from the organ!

The spiritual researcher is very familiar with such things and their essence, for he has no illusions. He knows that when some mystic speaks of experiencing the divine human within himself, of experiencing something that brings him together with his eternal self, then it is the 'sounds of the barrel organ': he has once taken something in, that has transformed itself – for such things transform themselves – that rises as reminiscence. In the path of ordinary mysticism you find nothing but what you have once absorbed, and you can give yourself up to the most terrible illusions by wanting to be a mere mystic.

It is precisely this limitation that the spiritual researcher must overcome. Through experience one comes to know that what cannot be proved “logically” can be attained by the spiritual researcher through direct experience: one learns to recognize that one may not learn to know oneself by looking inwardly. For if one could see through oneself inwardly, one would in turn lack a human soul power that one must have for ordinary life if one could see through oneself inwardly. If one could see through oneself inwardly, one would not have the power of memory in ordinary life. And that this power of memory, the power of memory, is healthy, depends on whether we are healthy at all in our soul life. If our memory, our recollection, is disturbed, the ego is disturbed, a terrible mental illness occurs. So that we have to say: just as man, in order to have love, must have limits in his knowledge of nature, so too, in order to have memory, he must be placed in the impossibility of coming to the higher human being through mere inner contemplation.

But one can also ensure that this ability to remember is more firmly rooted in human nature than in ordinary life, which can also be done through exercises such as those I have described in the book mentioned.

In the same way that you can move towards consciously elevating your thinking, as I have described, you can also move towards conscious self-discipline by always noticing: You are doing this or that badly, you have to learn from life. In this way, you can take your will development into your own hands, just as you took your thought development into your own hands. When you take your will development into your own hands, something develops that, so to speak, illuminates the otherwise dark will in which you find yourself in ordinary life: you feel everything that you feel as will, interspersed with thoughts. In a sense, you are the spectator of your own will and action. When one comes to be the observer of one's own will and actions in such a tangible, spiritual and soul-like way, then what one receives as a higher willpower coincides with what developed earlier as thought activity. And now another faculty comes into play: one now beholds in one's own human nature something that appears so independent of all physical activity that one knows: What you carry within you, you carry out through death into the spiritual world. Through the culture of the will, one comes to know the spiritual life that a person lives after death, just as one comes to know, through the culture of thought, the spiritual life that a person has experienced before birth or conception. As you can see, spiritual research cannot speak in the usual way about the supersensible human being, but must relate how one experiences being able to look at the life of a person before and after death.

By penetrating into the world of one's own human existence in this way, one encounters social life in a new form. One observes how one experiences this or that together with other people, how one enters into relationships with other people, how one becomes friends with other people or is connected or disconnected again through other circumstances in the world. One learns to recognize that everything that takes place in the physical-sensual world is only the beginning of something that develops further as we pass through the gate of death. The relationships of the soul that are formed here between human and human find their continuation when the human being passes through the gate of death. The life that joins death becomes a very concrete reality in that we know that we are connected to those people here through our relationships in the sensual life, even beyond death.

These are things that still seem strange to people today, but they must be mastered by the tasks of our time. If they are, then something quite different will come to the fore. Then man will recognize in a completely different light what he today calls his own human development, what he today calls history. If one develops abilities such as those of which I have spoken, then one also looks differently into the historical of humanity than the fable convenue indicates, which is called history today and which must become something completely different in the future. I will give you an example at the end of my discussion to show you how the human being of the future must penetrate into the historical development of humanity itself.

We do not usually notice it, but at a certain historical point in recent times, a major turning point occurred in the development of humanity. That was in the middle of the 15th century. We usually say that nature does not make any leaps. It is a saying that is generally believed, although it is false. Nature is constantly making leaps. Consider the development of a plant, how a flower with stamens and pistils develops from a leaf, and finally the fruit! In the same way, historical life also makes leaps. And such a leap occurred in the middle of the 15th century, which we only fail to recognize because we look at history so superficially. The expanded human gaze, which overcomes, as it overcomes the experiences between birth and death, also that which is only presented in external history, in external facts, and it looks into the spirit of historical activity. And so this view shows that we have been living since the middle of the 15th century in the age that will last for a long time, which replaced another age that began in the 8th century BC and lasted until the middle of the 15th century. century. This era, from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, encompasses everything that was the magnificent Greek culture, what was Roman culture, and the after-effects of Greek and Roman civilization. And since the middle of the 15th century, we have, as I will characterize it in a moment, our modern culture with modern humanity.

How do these two cultures differ? They differ in something that people in the present time do not yet want to see and acknowledge. Before the 15th century, going back to the 8th century BC, man was capable of development in a completely different way than today. I can make this clear to you in the following way. Think about what the human being is like in the years before he changes his teeth around the seventh year, and how that marks a turning point in his life! You can read more about this in the small booklet on 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. You will see what it actually means for the more precise observer of human nature, what the child goes through with the change of teeth. There is a parallelism between the outer development of the body and the inner development of the soul. Then, in turn, there is a next point of development at the time of sexual maturity, in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then the parallelism between body and soul becomes less clear, but for present humanity it continues until about the twenty-seventh year. In the twenty-seventh year, one ceases to feel this connection between spiritual-soul development and bodily development strongly. This remarkable fact that the human being completes his physical development at the age of twenty-seven has only emerged since the middle of the 15th century. It was different in the previous period. What can be recognized here through spiritual research is an infinitely significant human developmental truth. In Greek and Roman times, human beings were at such a stage of development that until the age of thirty-three or thirty-five, there was a parallelism between their physical and spiritual-soul development. The Greeks developed qualities such as these, although not to the same extent, until well into their thirties, as evidenced by the change of teeth and sexual maturity. This is what constituted the remarkable harmony of soul and body in the Greeks. The progression that human history shows is that we have less and less of the years of youth, less and less of what emancipated us from the physical and bodily in our earlier years. But this also requires a completely different position of the soul-spiritual to the world being in the human being. In the long period from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, human beings developed more of an instinctive mind and an instinctive emotional life. Everything that lives in this period is permeated by this instinctive life of mind and soul. But since the middle of the 15th century, man has developed a more conscious mental and emotional life and with it the demand to place himself on the level of the free personality. This demand of human nature to place itself on the level of the free personality is only developing in history since the middle of the 15th century.

This also explains how the great events in human development fall differently depending on whether they occur in one or the other epoch. In the epoch that preceded our own, in which man remained capable of physical development well into his thirties, the greatest event in the development of the earth occurred in the first third of this epoch: the event that actually gives the development of the earth its true meaning, the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, the founding of Christianity. In the first third of the Greco-Latin era, what is like the central event of the whole human development on earth took place. The way it took place in the human race at that time, it could only be grasped naively by humanity in the age in which instinctive powers of mind and instinctive powers of the soul were present. It was only through these instinctive powers that people were able to relate to the great event in the right way during that period, because they did not yet behave consciously, but naively. They said to themselves: This is not just something that is done by human beings, something superhuman has broken into earthly development. The Christ, the superhuman being, has united with the body of Jesus of Nazareth. What happened at Golgotha is, in its physical facts, only the outer expression of something supersensible that has taken place in the development of the earth.

In those days, therefore, it could be grasped instinctively. This has changed since the middle of the 15th century. Since the middle of the 15th century, the instinctive mind, the instinctive power of mind, has been transformed into conscious mind, into conscious powers of mind. This made it possible to develop natural science to the high level it has reached, but also to develop industry, and to develop the materialism of the age, which had to be there as an adjunct to place the free personality at the top. But this materialism must be transcended by seeking the path to the spiritual world in a new way, as I have described it today. The age became materialistic in the epoch in which the consciousness soul of man developed from the earlier instinctive soul. Then, in addition to external materialism, the materialism of theology also emerged. Consider how, in wide circles, even theology, the religious view, has been grasped by materialism; how man of the age of consciousness became incapable of recognizing the supersensible in the event of Golgotha, how he came more and more to drag it down into the sensual; how he finally became proud of it, how even numerous theologians became proud of no longer seeing in the Christ the supersensible entity that descended to earth in the body of a human being, but only seeing the “simple man from Nazareth,” who is indeed somewhat greater than other people, but is nevertheless merely a human being. That in the Mystery of Golgotha, in the death and resurrection of Christ, the greatest fact in the evolution of the world and of humanity is presented to us, has not yet dawned upon the materialistic age. Religion itself has become materialized. Simple religious belief will not be able to stop this materialization of religion. It can only be stopped by the conscious knowledge of the spirit, of which I have spoken today. It will in turn arise from the realization that in Jesus of Nazareth there lived a supermundane, a supersensible being, which since that time has united itself with the evolution of mankind. The Mystery of Golgotha will be placed in the sphere of human contemplation through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science; but now it will be placed in such a way that it will be freed from the narrow-mindedness of the individual denominations.

What will develop as the spiritual outlook of the supersensible human being, as I have described it today, will make it possible for it to live in every human being across the whole earth, without distinction of race or nationality. From there, however, the path to the mystery of Golgotha will also be found, and all people across the whole earth will understand this Christ event, learn to comprehend it. In our time people enthuse about the so-called League of Nations; one enthuses about this League of Nations in the utopian way in which it originated in the abstract thinking of Woodrow Wilson. It will not be able to arise in this way. It needs a foundation of reality, and this must proceed from the innermost part of the human soul. That is the task of the present time. Only in this ability of the soul, which leads to the path of knowledge of the supersensible human being and unites people of the whole earth, only through such knowledge, which can look at the Christ event as a supersensible event, only in such an impulse, which works across nations, which works across all borders through nations, lies the real power for a future true League of Nations across the earth. In this way, Christianity must strike its new roots into human culture.

This shows you the other side to what I was allowed to say here in the previous lecture. This shows you the side that corresponds to the human inner soul life, which in turn will ignite social instincts in the human being when it fills him. To receive this spiritual science, one does not need to believe in authority as one does to receive the other scientific knowledge that is conveyed, say, from the observatory about astronomy, from medicine about the nature of the physical human being. That must be accepted on authority if one does not want to become an astronomer or a physiologist and so on oneself. But you do not have to believe what the spiritual researcher tells you on authority. You do not have to be a spiritual researcher yourself, just as you do not have to be a painter to find the beauty in a picture. You can absorb spiritual science through your common sense without being a spiritual researcher yourself, if you just sweep away the prejudices that have developed from today's materialism. Because everything in spiritual science is stored in the depths of the human soul, it can be understood without belief in authority. And this understanding, this trust in the revelations of spiritual science, is something that must be lived into the tasks of our age. Then this age will experience a renewal. Then this age will be given the ferment for what, as an external institution of a new structure, will have to play a corresponding role.

For what do we see when we really try to understand the nature of the present time? I would say: We see two paths, one on the left and one on the right. One of these offers us the possibility of stopping at the views that mere natural science has brought, and from this view, which natural science has brought, to now also proceed to social views; thus to start from the belief that one can understand social life with the same faculty of thought with which one understands nature. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did that, and so do Lenin and Trotsky. That is why they arrive at their conclusions. People today do not yet realize that natural science stands on one side, and that its ultimate consequences find expression in social chaos and social decline. The terrible faith that now seeks to destroy all truly human culture in Eastern Europe, this terrible faith of Lenin and Trotsky, arises from the other faith, that the paths of scientific knowledge must also be followed in social life. What has happened under the influence of this newer materialistic-scientific faith? Our entire spiritual life has been mechanized. But because our spiritual life no longer rises to thoughts about the supersensible human being, because it mechanizes itself on the external mechanistic view of nature, at the same time the souls are vegetarianized, made plant-like, sleepy. Thus we see that in addition to the mechanized mind, we have a vegetarianized soul in modern cultural life. But if the soul is not warmed through by the spirit, if the spirit is not suffused with supersensible knowledge, then animal qualities develop in the body. Today these animal qualities live in anti-social instincts and want to become the executioners of culture in Eastern Europe. Then, under the guise of wanting to socialize, the most anti-social thing develops; then the bodily life becomes animalized alongside the mechanized spirit and the vegetated soul. The wildest instincts and drives arise as historical demands. That is the path that leads left.

The other way, the right way, is to enter into the view of the supersensible human being, the supersensible world, as presented in today's message. This view also sees the development of the human being in the supersensible light, and penetrates to the truly free spirit.

In my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”, I wanted to describe freedom as the basis for human progress, and to show how man can experience his true inner freedom by grasping the spiritual life. Only the spirit that permeates man can truly become free. The spirit that only permeates nature and seeks to shape all social life according to the pattern of modern natural science becomes mechanistically unfree. And the soul, permeated only by this spirit, sleeps like the plant. The soul that is warmed through by the true, pulsating will of spiritual knowledge of supersensible human nature steps forward in social life. It learns to recognize the supersensible human being in the other person. It learns to see the divine in the archetype in every person. It learns social feeling towards every person. It learns how, with regard to this innermost soul, all people here on earth are equal. And in this soul, warmed by the spirit, equality can develop in the other way on the right. And when the bodies are imbued and spiritualized by the supersensible consciousness, when they are warmed through, when they are ennobled by what the soul absorbs, by being awakened by the spirit, not remaining vegetated, then the bodies will not become animalized either; then the bodies become such that they develop what, in the broadest sense, can be called genuine love. Then, then the human being knows that he enters into his earthly body as a supersensible being, that he enters into this body to develop love in this body, to develop love towards the spirit. Then he knows that there must be brotherhood in the earthly body, otherwise the individual cannot be a whole, a full human being in unbrotherly humanity.

Thus the continuation of the old way leads us to the mechanization of the spirit, to the vegetarianization of the soul, to the animalization of the body. The path that is to be shown by spiritual science leads us to the true social virtues, but to the social virtues that are permeated by the spirit and warmed by the soul; that are carried out by the ennobled human body.

Thus spiritual knowledge of the supersensible human being leads us to found the future on a beautiful new building on earth: freedom in spiritual life. The spiritualized human being will be a free human being. Equality in the soul life warmed by the spirit: the soul that takes in the spirit will perceive and treat the other soul that it encounters in social life as truly equal, as if in a great secret. And the ennobled body, the body ennobled by spirit and soul, will become the vehicle of truest, most genuine human love, of true brotherhood. Thus the social order of man in freedom, equality and brotherhood will be able to take place through the correct understanding of body, soul and spirit.

A kind of nightmare-like oppression can weigh on the soul of anyone observing the current cultural life of humanity, a kind of contraction of the tortured heart, when one realizes that there are still relatively few people who want to see with an unbiased eye how we are on a slippery slope with regard to the most important branches of our cultural life. This downward slide has become sufficiently apparent through the events of recent years, through everything that has befallen people. But we still often find today that people are of the opinion that, unless drastic action is taken, things must remain at least as chaotic as they have become, and that we can continue to work from what is already there; the rest will take care of itself. Over the years, I have repeatedly had to speak out against these feelings of temporariness and point out the necessity of relearning and rethinking in order to find the inclination to think about a real renewal of our public affairs and public life from the deepest foundations of our intellectual and cultural life. And even though there are already a small number of people today who have become aware of this, and all signs indicate that without such decisive action the downward spiral will have to be continued and continued, even these few people will find little understanding for what is necessary for a new metamorphosis of the human spirit to emerge from the ice, in order to lead to a recovery, to a healing of many an ill, who are living out their lives on the slippery slope of our cultural life.

Three phenomena stand out, from which the most important for understanding our time and what is necessary in it can be seen. The first I would call the main defect of our time. For decades, the lectures on spiritual science have endeavored to point out this main defect and also to point out the many things that must follow from this main defect of insufficient knowledge and insight into spiritual life itself for the development of humanity in the present and the near future. The second thing that speaks loudly and clearly from the facts of the present, I would call the main demand. And this main demand has been sounding in many hearts for more than a century, since Schiller, in his “Don Carlos”, had the words spoken: “Give freedom of thought!” Those who look more deeply into the social and spiritual life of our time will be able to see how, behind many of today's consciously formulated social demands, the demand for free activity of the innermost human being, of human thought, is actually hidden. Many people sigh under the compulsion of their thought life, which comes either from old existing institutions or from the new economic conditions. They find themselves either officially existing beliefs or the constraints of economic life in their free development of thought inhibited. What actually lives in the soul, remains largely unconscious, but what rises to consciousness, comes in the fact that one can not be satisfied with anything, there is something that does not let people openly and freely confess before himself: I may lead a dignified human existence. And so the most diverse programs arise, which contain very beautiful things, but do not reach down to the bottom of the soul to see what is actually living there. If one searches for what is living there: it is the longing for the freest activity of the innermost human being, for what could be summarized with the expression of the time's demand for freedom of thought. And one need only utter the words “social forces” – and it can be felt how this indicates that modern intellectual, modern legal and political, and modern economic conditions have brought us to an age in which the productive forces of life operate in a complicated way, and how we are not able are unable, from what we have intellectually mastered, from what we want to process programmatically, to organize these social forces, in which human beings are interwoven, in such a way that within this organization the individual human being, who has come to the awareness of his humanity, can satisfactorily answer the question: Do I lead a dignified existence?

I may assume that the majority of the listeners gathered here today have been able to gather from the lectures and the writings, which further elaborate on the content of these lectures and which I have published, over the course of many years, what the inner meaning and spirit of the spiritual science referred to here is. This spiritual science believes that it must, out of a sense of the necessity of the times, place itself in the present-day cultural life. Today, since I can refer to the numerous lectures already given here, I will only need to touch on some fundamental points. Above all, however, I would like to touch on one introductory point again, which has already been discussed in the most diverse forms.

When spiritual science is mentioned, the outside world often associates it with all kinds of complicated mysticism, complicated theosophy, and so on. Although spiritual science does what it can to educate people about its true meaning, it is still spoken of in such a way in the broadest circles that it represents the exact opposite of what this spiritual science actually wants to be. First and foremost, the representatives of this spiritual science feel that for three to four centuries a way of thinking has emerged within humanity that dominates our entire lives and that has found its most significant expression in the way of thinking of modern natural science. Please do not misunderstand me on this point. I do not want to awaken the belief that I assume that only those people who have undergone some kind of scientific education are imbued with that school of thought. It is not like that. People from the widest circles, right down to those with a very primitive culture and education, who today want to be enlightened about the nature of man, about the nature of social life, and about the nature of the universe, think in such a way, they present in such a direction as it has been expressed mainly by natural science. And it is no wonder that this is so, because our whole life, which surrounds us and in which we are interwoven throughout the day, is basically a result of this scientific way of thinking.

Those who have heard me speak often know that I do not underestimate this scientific way of thinking, and that I recognize its great triumphs. But it has achieved these triumphs precisely because it has been able to take hold of part of our practical life in such a magnificent way, because over the last three to four centuries it has become magnificently one-sided. Everything that people think in this direction is based on an understanding of inanimate nature, of the physical and chemical, which then passes into technology, into everything that underlies our life institutions, and which, for example, is also incorporated into our healing methods, that is, into those insights that are intended to help human life from a certain point of view. But anyone who recognizes, without prejudice, the tremendous progress that has been made in the biological, physical and chemical aspects of the natural sciences, and who is able to appreciate the significance of what conscientious methodology has achieved in this respect, is precisely the person who, at the same time, is also able to fully grasp the limitations of this natural scientific way of thinking. I have explained this countless times here, and I would now like to summarize it in the words: Those who penetrate more deeply into what we today call genuine natural science will find that this natural science provides excellent insights into inanimate nature and into that in the living that, I might say, consists of inclusions in this inanimate nature. But there is one thing that we must stop at when we survey the scope of knowledge of the natural scientific way of thinking: We must stop before the actual essence of man. There is no way, if one does not want to indulge in self-deception, to believe that these views, which have led us so deeply into the inanimate, which have “brought us so gloriously far” in our technical achievements, that these views can provide any insight into the essence of man. This knowledge of the human being – that can be known by the one who does not cling to that fable convenue, which is not history but is called history – this knowledge of the human being was something instinctive for man up to three to four centuries ago. A certain knowledge of the human being lived out of an original, elementary instinct of humanity. However, just as the individual human being undergoes a development, so does all of humanity. And no matter how much we are deceived into claiming the opposite, humanity has now reached a point in its development where it can no longer judge the human essence from mere instinct. It is necessary for man to penetrate consciously into the essence of man himself, just as he must consciously penetrate into the phenomena of the outer life of nature, as Copernicus and Galileo did. When we come to the decisive point, where science and research must stop short before the insight into the human being, there is nothing left but to turn to what I have often mentioned: the intellectual modesty that is necessary for the human being, which can only provide the basis for the pursuit of true human development.

Those who cannot develop this intellectual modesty out of a genuine desire for knowledge will not be able to arrive at a true understanding of the human being. You have to be able to say to yourself: I see a five-year-old child, and I give him a volume of Goethe's lyrical poems. He looks at it and may well tear the book apart. He is going through the same process that an adult who has undergone development also goes through, so that he can really find what is meant to speak to him from this volume of poems. But just as one must admit that the child must first develop in order to relate to what is happening to him in the right way, so today one must also say: just as the human being is placed in existence by nature, he stands before human life itself like a five-year-old child before a volume of Goethe's poetry, if he does not have the will to guide his development beyond what is usually considered the only possible method today. One must take one's development into one's own hands. But then it becomes apparent that there are hidden forces in the human being that can be awakened and that give an equally rigorous scientific insight as only a natural science can give, but which go beyond the knowledge of the external world, the world of the senses, and lead into the supersensible, and only then lead to a true understanding of the human being. We must be able to admit: we cannot approach the human being with the ordinary powers that are sufficient for the knowledge of nature. We can only do so if we bring out the powers of knowledge that otherwise lie dormant in us, as the powers of understanding do in a five-year-old child, from the depths of the human soul.

And so the spiritual science referred to here represents the view that it is possible, from the standpoint that is sufficient to recognize external inanimate nature, to lead people to points of view of knowledge from which one can penetrate into the human being. This spiritual science does not want to be an idle brooding in inner mysticism; this spiritual science also does not want to handle any outer machinations to advance to the spirit, but wants to be something that builds so strictly on that for which the human being is really capable of developing, as, for example, the mathematician builds on the development of those abilities that are also brought forth entirely from within the human being. This spiritual science does not want to be as strictly logical as any other branch of science, but it does want to apply this logic only to what arises as a spiritual vision when what lies dormant within the human being is truly awakened in a natural way. In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have pointed out that it is entirely through inward, soul-spiritual methods that this development of inner, spiritual-soul forces is brought about in man, and how, through this, , to use Goethe's words, a spiritual eye, a soul ear, a spirit ear, so that he can see and hear the spiritual and soul realm, for which we basically only have words today. It is pointed out that it is important to cultivate a certain strengthening of our thinking life. I have emphasized the necessity of a certain self-discipline, of taking our development into our own hands, for otherwise we simply abandon ourselves to life, so that the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear are closed.

Most people today are still quite hostile to anything that comes from this side. And yet, one need only point out how, in our time, when social demands are springing up everywhere, the most anti-social instincts prevail. Where do these come from? They come from the fact that people actually pass each other by without understanding and that they do not comprehend one another. And why do they not understand one another? Because their knowledge, what they call knowledge, does not engage the whole person, because it remains in the head, because it is limited to the mere intellect. The peculiar thing about the spiritual science meant here is that the knowledge it provides through the developed forces engages the whole person, that it not only speaks to the intellect, not only to the intellect, but that they imbue feeling and will, that they infuse understanding of human nature, understanding of all that lives and moves beside and beyond us, that they pulsate with ethics, with morals, with a social attitude that simultaneously impacts directly on practical life.

This spiritual science does not know the unfortunate division that is discussed on every street corner today, the division into mental and manual labor. After all, what is our manual labor? It is nothing more than the use of the bodily tools at our disposal in the service of our will. But when we are clear about the fact - and I have often spoken of it - that this will, as a spiritual force, pulses through everything we do as a whole human being, and in turn radiates back to the intellect in our head, - when we really have the whole human being in mind, only then will we understand the innermost impulse of this spiritual science.

Please excuse me for mentioning something personal on this occasion. But in this case, the personal will serve to clarify the matter. The spiritual science that is being discussed here is to be served on the Dornach hill in northwestern Switzerland, a piece of Jura, the Goetheanum built there, which is intended as a university for spiritual science. When the time came to found this School of Spiritual Science and to dedicate the outer structure to it, it was not a matter of going to someone who, based on old architectural or artistic ideas, would have built a structure into which one would then have moved in order to pursue this spiritual science. No, it had to be something else. From the very beginning, this spiritual science was conceived in such a fruitful way that it can intervene in the whole of external cultural life, that it can truly infuse anew that which has become old in our art, in our architecture, in our life, in our work. So one could not simply give someone the commission: Build me a building in the Greek, Romanesque, Gothic or some other architectural style. Rather, out of this spiritual science itself, just as out of the other thoughts of life, just as out of the other impulses of life, so too did the architectural thoughts arise, which suggested: this is how this building must be in every line, in every single form. And so the building was undertaken that in every single form, even the smallest, it will indeed be the external crystallization of what underlies this spiritual science as a way of thinking, as an attitude.

And so perhaps I may say the following about myself: It was in the fall of 1913 and in the winter of 1914 that I myself worked out the model of this building, the whole building in miniature. Now that I have worked out the model, I ask about which even the architectural drawings are made: Was what I worked out in manual labor, was it manual labor or mental work? It was something where both came together and worked as one. I know this because I just did the thing. Then again, there is hardly anything about this building where I, like every single worker, did not lend a hand here and there. And for anyone who might be interested, I would like to say: we are working as the central figure of this building, a nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group, which is supposed to represent the human enigma of our time, but in an artistic way. The task was to create a sculpted woodwork. Although the work is artistic, it is, if I may use the expression, a wood-chopping, and I could show the calluses on my fingers, which provide evidence that here mental work in direct manual labor from morning to evening itself is executed.

Recently, we had to decide on a certain financial matter; we needed to make the chairs. We got the cost estimate. The price was outrageous. So we made the model of a chair ourselves in our artistic studio, working together with a worker who is indeed extraordinarily skilled. When the model was finished – the chair will cost only two-fifths of what it would have cost according to the other proposal – again, one could not tell where the intellectual work ended and the manual labor began.

One may even say: in the way we work together in social life with our co-workers, who are made up of friends of our movement on the one hand and workers on the other, there is actually only one obstacle without which it would become apparent that mental work and manual work flow together everywhere. For example, we have a lady who is a certified medical assistant and who sharpens knives for our sculptors from morning till evening. And we can ask: What prevents what the wit, who are called spiritual workers, do, from simply flowing into what the workers do, to the complete satisfaction of both sides, to the most completely satisfying social collaboration? Yes, I do understand everything that has come about as social phenomena. Nevertheless, I must say that if I am to speak of the only obstacle that makes it impossible to hand over both manual labor and mental work to the manual laborer, it is the fact that the workers are organized and view everything that comes from the intellectual workers with mistrust, even though they are actually doing the same thing.

Why is it that today there is such a deep abyss between what lies in our art, in our science, in short, in our spiritual life and also in the spiritual direction of our social life, and in the external work that the proletarian movement in particular is dealing with today? This gulf has come about because what concerns the whole human being has fled from our way of thinking. A recovery for this lies only in spiritual science, not in a one-sided, complicated mysticism or theosophy, which idle people may pursue in their little rooms, without any momentum. The healing power of this spiritual science lies in the fact that it engages the whole human being. And I have said this now in order to make the following comment: I know that the insights that I am presenting to the world today with full responsibility would not have come to me if I had only worked with my head, if I had not had to devote my whole life to something that is usually called manual labor; because this also has a certain effect on a person. What is only the so-called brainwork, what only engages the intellect, does not reach to the spirit. And something that will seem highly paradoxical to many people today, I would like to mention here. Today, out there in practical life, we say: manual labor, practice; inside, from the intellect: intellectual work! Oh no, it is not at all as these words would lead us to believe. We have the separation between outer life practice and the so-called spiritual life because the spirit has fled from both, because today we are caught in the mechanical treadmill of technology, because the worker stands at the machine and merely performs mechanical tasks according to the instructions of the intellect, and because, on the other hand, those who are educated for an intellectual life are not sufficiently involved in real practical work. Our practical life is spiritless, and so is our intellectualized spiritual life. Only when the full activity of the human being in the world flows back into our heads, into our thinking, which can only arise from the harmonious activity of the whole human being, only when we do not only think with our heads, but think as one thinks when one has once formed something with one's hand and felt how it radiates back into the head, only then will the thought be so fully saturated with reality that there is spirit in it. That which is merely thought out is just as spiritless as that which is spiritlessly worked on a machine.

The spiritual science referred to here should not practise mysticism that is alien to life. It should arise from full engagement with life and should be much more saturated with reality than what is usually meant by intellectual life today. Or is what is meant today as spiritual life saturated with reality? Do we not see how powerless science is to really grasp the spirit? People who are generally immersed in our modern culture believe that they are doing unprejudiced natural science. But how did this unprejudiced natural science actually come about? Through the fact that for many centuries everything that people longed to know about soul and spirit, about that which extends beyond birth and death, was dependent on what the confessions monopolized, due to social circumstances. When the spirit of modern science arose, what did social life actually look like? Everything that people were allowed to know about soul and spirit was monopolized in the dogmas of the confessional societies. One was not allowed to think about soul and spirit, one was only allowed to think about the external world of the senses. And in this, people who have pursued natural science have found themselves. They got into the habit of thinking and researching only about the external world of the senses because research into spirit and soul had been forbidden for centuries. They translated this into certain ideas, they only pursued external sensory science. Then, through a grandiose self-deception, this has become the belief that exact science can only decide something about the external world of the senses, and that research into soul and spirit lies beyond the boundaries of knowledge. But this is also rooted in the soul life of modern man and permeates all life. One can gain fruitful thoughts about nature with such a view. But as soon as one wants to penetrate into social life, this way of thinking is not enough. There it is necessary, for the foundation of a real people's science, a real social science, that we imbue ourselves with a view of the whole human being. And that is lacking because the influences I have characterized prevented it.

So it has come about that people have said: Spirit and soul is something that has been established by dogmas for centuries. It cannot be researched. It is something that only through human will moves like smoke and fog over real life, and there, as the real thing, one forms nothing other than the economic forces themselves. Unbelief arose: the spiritual reigns in what the external economic forces are. And out of unbelief arose what has fatally taken hold in the hearts and minds of men. The belief arose that spiritual life could develop out of economic forces by itself, if only these were organized in a certain way. There is no realization that everything that has arisen economically is originally the result of intellectual life, but that our intellectual life has become unworldly, that there is an abyss between it and the outer life, and that for a recovery of our life we need a real spiritual science that penetrates into the essence of man, that penetrates man just as outer natural science penetrates the machine, but that must be built on the developed powers of human nature. In short, it is extraordinarily difficult to realize that spiritual science must become the basis for the understanding and mastering of social life. That is what the representative of spiritual science believes he recognizes: that the human intellect does not have enough impact, not even where it pulsates in today's social life, to immerse itself in real life, and that the latter must increasingly end in chaos if the impulses that reach into feeling and will, that can place human being next to human being in such a way that social forces can be organized, are not enlivened. No matter what natural scientific methods you take from the exact natural science that has reached its zenith in our time, you cannot establish a social science with them. The ideas that one gains without spiritual science behave in relation to social science in the same way as a color that one wants to paint on an oily surface. Just as the oily surface rejects the color, so life rejects what merely rules among us as intellectual science.

Thus external life cries out for the kind of depth that spiritual science provides. Spiritual science will have to provide the foundations for what people unconsciously express in their social demands today, what they cannot formulate clearly because the power of thought is not available. It is therefore necessary to understand this spiritual science not as something that one could devote a few thoughts to on the side, but as something that is among the most necessary conditions for the recovery of our lives. I know full well — for I truly do not believe I am an impractical person — that people say: We have our professions, we cannot devote ourselves to this spiritual science, which is quite extensive after all. Should not a little more thought also enter into the hearts and souls of people: Doesn't the present downward path on which we are walking show us — however much we are still in our profession — that we are only helping to shape the path into chaos? And shouldn't we consider it necessary to devote every hour that we can spare to such views, which now really and radically raise the question of recovery?

And what is meant here as spiritual science is intimately connected with that call in our time, which, as I have explained, is far older than a century, with that call, which I would like to describe as the call for freedom of thought. But this call is actually the call for social freedom. It is remarkable that when one tries to see through to what is rising to the surface in the waves of the so-called social demands in our present time, one repeatedly encounters the necessity to recognize how it actually relates to human freedom, to that impulse that expresses itself in one form or another as the impulse of human freedom. That this is an important point was recognized even by the man whom I consider the most unfortunate among the so-called outstanding people of our time who have gained influence over the shaping of conditions – even Woodrow Wilson recognized this. Since I never spoke differently about Woodrow Wilson even in neutral foreign countries during the war, while he was so adored by all sides, I may also speak about Woodrow Wilson today as I always have. There are numerous passages in his writings in which he points out that a recovery of the situation - he is primarily familiar with the American situation - can only come about if people's striving for freedom is truly taken into account.

But what is human freedom for Woodrow Wilson?

This brings us to a very, very interesting chapter in contemporary human thought - for Woodrow Wilson is, after all, a kind of representative thinker - where you will find the following view in his writing about freedom: You can form the concept of freedom by looking at a machine and how a gear wheel is attached. If it is attached in such a way that the mechanical device can move without hindrance, then one says that the gear wheel runs freely. When he looks at a ship, he says that the ship must be constructed in such a way that the machinery engages with the swell, so that it is not hindered, so that it moves with the swell, so to speak, is adapted to it, runs freely in the swell. Woodrow Wilson compares what the impulse of human freedom should really be to what a cogwheel in a machine or a ship in the waves of the sea is. He says: A person is free when he functions more or less like a wheel in a machine, when he functions freely in his external circumstances, so that he moves within them, so that he engages with his powers in what is going on around him, so that he is not hindered.

Now, I think it is very interesting that this peculiar view of human freedom can arise from the present-day scientific way of thinking and attitude. For is it not the opposite of freedom when one is so adapted to circumstances that one can only move in their sense? Does not freedom demand that one be able to stand up to external circumstances if necessary? Would not what lives as freedom have to be compared to what could, if necessary, behave in such a way that the ship turns against the waves and stops?

Where does this strange view come from, from which a healthy, statesmanlike insight can never arise, but at most the 14 abstract points of Wilson's pronouncements, which unfortunately were also admired here to some extent at a certain time? Hence it is that in our time it is not realized how one must go back to the human idea itself, to that idea which is conceived as an idea and which, if one really speaks of freedom, can provide the only real free impulse for human life. This is what I tried to present more than thirty years ago in my Philosophy of Freedom, a new edition of which has recently been published with corresponding additions. There, however, I tried to understand this impulse for freedom in a different way than it is currently being done. I tried to show how the question about human freedom has been wrongly formulated. The question is: Is man free or is he not free? Is man a free being who can make decisions out of his soul with real responsibility, or is he harnessed into a natural or spiritual necessity like a natural being? This question has been asked for thousands of years, and it is still being asked. This question alone is the great error.

One cannot ask the question in this way. Rather, the question of freedom is a question of human development, of a human development such that in the course of his youth or perhaps his later life, man develops powers within himself that he does not simply have by nature. One cannot ask: Is man free? By nature he is not, but he can make himself more and more free by awakening forces that lie dormant in him and that nature does not awaken. Man can become more and more free. One cannot ask: Is man free or unfree, but only: Is there a way for man to achieve freedom? And this way exists. As I said, thirty years ago I tried to show that when man develops an inner life within himself, so that he grasps the moral impulses for his actions in pure thoughts, he can really base his actions on thought impulses, not just instinctive emotions – thoughts that merge into external reality as the lover into the beloved. Then man approaches his freedom. Freedom is just as much a child of the thought, which is grasped in spiritual clairvoyance - not under an external compulsion - as it is a child of

of true devoted love, love for the object of our activity. What German spiritual life strove for in Schiller, when he confronted Kant and sensed something of such a concept of freedom, befits us to further develop in the present. But then it became clear to me that one can only speak of that which underlies moral actions – even if it remains unconscious in people, it is still there – and that one must call it intuition. And so in my “Philosophy of Freedom” I spoke of a moral intuition.

But this also provided the starting point for everything I later attempted to achieve in the field of spiritual science. Do not think that I now have an immodest opinion of these things. I know very well that this 'Philosophy of Freedom', which I conceived more than thirty years ago as a young man, has, to a certain extent, all the teething troubles of the intellectual life that emerged during the 19th century. But I also know that out of this intellectual life has sprung what is a leading up of the intellectual life into the truly spiritual. So that I can say to myself: When man rises to the moral impulses in moral intuition and represents a truly free being, then he is already, if I may use the frowned-upon word, “clairvoyant” with regard to his moral intuitions. In that which lies beyond all sensuality lie the impulses of all morality. Fundamentally, the truly moral commandments are the results of human clairvoyance. Therefore, there was a straight path from that “philosophy of freedom” to what I mean today by spiritual science. Freedom arises in man only when man develops. But he can develop further so that what is already the basis of freedom also drives him to become independent of all sensuality and to rise freely into the realms of the spirit.

Thus, freedom is connected with the development of human thinking. Freedom is basically always freedom of thought, and especially when we look at such representative people as Woodrow Wilson, we have to say: because such people have never grasped what the thought of something truly spiritual is, how it must be rooted in the spiritual if it is not to be abstract, that is why they can invent such paradoxical definitions as Woodrow Wilson has invented for freedom. From such things we see the inadequacy of the present spiritual life, the main defect of which is that it does not recognize the spiritual nature of man. We see what the main demand is: freedom of thought, and what the main need is: the mastering of social forces, if this life is to develop into the basis for these three great demands in the present for the near future. Thus, what is a truly original impulse in man does not depend on what can be achieved in man through scientific thinking, but on what can only be achieved through spiritual contemplation.

So much has been argued about freedom because people want to decide on it without entering the ground on which the knowledge of the immortality of the human soul arises. And no one who does not approach the question of the realization of human immortality, of the eternal in man, in an unbiased way is able to understand the essence of human freedom. If one does not seek the essence of this freedom in the flashing forth of the thought that is not merely given by nature, then one does not find this essence of freedom. But only when it has been found does it permeate and pulsate through the human being in such a way that he can become a truly social being, for it carries him alongside other human beings into the social order in such a way that social forces can be released from within. And we need this sense of social forces.

I mentioned earlier that in Dornach, where we are building, we are able to place people who have even reached certain heights in spiritual training and who do the most ordinary, dirty work, which in fact is in no way inferior to that of those who are usually called manual laborers. In social terms, however, the construction of Dornach is based on foundations that are not necessarily the same as those of an enterprise geared towards material gain. But if you take on board what I have set out in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and in the lectures on threefolding, you will find that it is possible to create similar foundations for the whole of life as those that have been created in Dornach for the building that is to represent our spiritual scientific movement. It is a pity that many people in other countries cannot visit this building today, because unfortunately we have come to a point where crossing national borders has become almost impossible.

But why is it possible, after all, to release social energies in such a way that the ideal of the proletarian movement is fulfilled, albeit differently than one dreams? Because everything that is done there is based on the conception of life, on this whole-hearted attack on life, which results from the impulses of spiritual science, because every single thing is done on the basis of spiritual science. What is done on a small scale on the basis of spiritual science can also be done on a large scale in social life on the basis of a spiritual-scientific understanding of life. Every factory, every bank, every external undertaking can be organized in a way that only someone who is able to think about practical life with a science that descends so deeply into the human being that it grasps not abstract thoughts and natural laws but living facts can organize. These living facts can be found if one only descends deeply enough into the human being through the indicated methods. It is not an abstract mysticism that is sought, but the facts of life through which the human being stands in reality. And by recognizing the human being, one finds at the same time through this spiritual science that which can bring the social forces into the corresponding organization, so that the people living in this organization can answer the question satisfactorily: Is human life worthy of a human being?

So the three things are connected: social forces, freedom of thought and spiritual science. Spiritual science is truly the opposite of what it is often portrayed as. A life of leisure, people think, the dream of idle people. No, spiritual science wants to be a way of life, precisely the way of life that our time lacks most. It wants to immerse itself in life, to master life in science and practice, because it wants to immerse itself in the reality of the human being, not just in the humanly conceived life. There are well-meaning people today who say: the mere mind, the mere intellect, which has developed over the past centuries and into our time, is no longer good for the recovery of our lives. But when asked what is useful, they give general answers: a re-fertilization of the soul through the 'spirit'. When it comes to true spiritual science, they reject it because they are still afraid of it, or use the strangest excuses. So you will always find people saying: Not everyone can become a spiritual researcher. Certainly, not everyone can do it, I have emphasized this again and again here. For although one can take those first steps into the spiritual worlds, into the supersensible existence, as I have described them in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Secret Science” , anyone can do them at any time, but the advance to those questions that deal with the beings of the supersensible worlds in a deeper sense is indeed tied to a variety of experiences that not everyone is ready for today. Those who want to look into the spiritual world, who want to become spiritual researchers in the truest sense, must undergo many struggles. You need only consider that at the moment when you really enter into a realization that does not make use of the senses, at the moment when you enter into a body-free cognition and the familiar outer world is no longer there, - that you are then in a world that presents all sorts of unfamiliar things: All the things that usually support you, the secure external experience, the ordinary intellect, have to give way to other, inner powers of judgment. You are like over an abyss and have to hold on by the center of gravity of your own being. Many people have an unconscious or subconscious fear of this, which they then express in logic when it comes to spiritual science. You may hear the most beautiful arguments; but in truth it is only the fear of the unknown.

But then you must also bear in mind that you, as you are as a human being, are not adapted to the spiritual world, that you are only adapted to the outer world of the senses. You enter into a completely different world for which you have not developed any habits of life. When one penetrates deeper, this causes those terribly painful experiences that must be overcome in real spiritual knowledge. Then, when they are overcome, insights follow from the innermost part of our being that provide information about what is eternal in human nature, what the spiritual is that underlies the world. Not all people can go through this path to such an extent. But I also had to assert time and again that it is not necessary to go through this path, but that all that is needed is common sense. For this common sense, if it is not misled by the prejudices of external views, can distinguish whether the one who presents himself as a spiritual researcher and speaks of initially unknown worlds speaks logically or like a spiritualist or otherwise. Logic is at hand, and one can judge whether the person in question is speaking logically and in such a way that the way he speaks indicates that the experiences he is talking about are being undergone in full mental health.

If one repeatedly objects: Yes, everyone can convince themselves of what external science says, that is correct. One need only discuss laboratory methods to be able to do so. But one can also say: Everyone can convince himself that what is described in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Theosophy” is correct; one can deduce the inner value of the knowledge from the nature of the spiritual researcher. Then these insights are as valuable for life as they are in the soul of the spiritual researcher himself. The researcher is checked in external science by the external facts; the insights are checked by the way of speaking, the way they are clothed, the way the spiritual researcher has to say. He can be checked by common sense.

Consider what social forces will be unleashed when more and more people emerge as witnesses for the spiritual forces that can only be found in the supersensible, and which other people who cannot be spiritual researchers themselves – not everyone can be a chemist or a physicist – accept out of their common sense and trust, which is based on common sense. What kind of social life arises from this evaluation of the human being is precisely one of the most important points for awakening social forces of trust. They are undermined in our time, when everyone, without taking their development into their own hands, wants to judge everything as soon as they come of age. And that this spiritual science can really provide practical impulses in social life, we have tried to do so here with the establishment of the Waldorf school, which we owe to our dear Mr. Molt, in which the school system is to be built on true knowledge. We want to solve a social question in the right way; because we want a human being to grow in every child, who receives that guiding force for later life, so that social forces are developed in a fruitful way from the human being, not from a dull, inadequate knowledge, as it often dominates social thinking in our time. We really want to develop social thinking that is built on human trust, on the secure foundations of the human soul. And by seeing the developing human being in every child who attends this school, by trying to develop him or her through insights that can enliven the pedagogical foundations, we see something that is necessary, as in everything we try to bring out of this spiritual science.

Of course, I can only describe this spiritual science as a necessary requirement for present and future development from a few points of view. Thus it happens that antagonisms arise from such one-sided allusions because one does not see the whole picture. But now, at the end, I would like to come back to the beginning and point out how heavy the heart can become when one sees how few people there are who appreciate the downward slide; how one does not look for the foundations for a new structure of our spiritual, moral and other cultural life.

This can be seen from many things. Let me give you a few examples in conclusion. Even people who are thought to be firmly established in the external life, what view have they come to based on the facts? The words written by the Austrian statesman Czernin in his latest book deserve to be heeded:

"The war continues, albeit in a different form. I believe that future generations will not call the great drama that has dominated the world for five years the World War at all, but the World Revolution, and will know that this World Revolution only began with the World War. Neither the Peace of Versailles nor St-Germain will create a lasting work. In this peace lies the disintegrating seed of death. The struggles that are shaking Europe are not yet diminishing. Like a violent earthquake, the subterranean rumblings continue. Soon the earth will open here and there, hurling fire against the sky. Again and again, events of elemental force will sweep devastatingly across the lands until everything that reminds us of the madness of this war is swept away. Slowly, with unspeakable sacrifice, a new world will be born. Future generations will look back on our time as if it were a long, evil dream. But day always follows the darkest night. Generations have sunk into the grave, murdered, starved, succumbed to disease. Millions have died in the pursuit of annihilation and destruction, hatred and murder in their hearts. But other generations will arise, and with them a new spirit. They will build up what war and revolution have destroyed. Every winter is followed by spring. That, too, is an eternal law in the cycle of life, that resurrection follows death. Blessed are those who will be called upon to help build the new world as soldiers of labor.

Now, here too there is talk of the new spirit; I know that if one were to speak to this Czernin about the new spirit, he would shrink back, would consider it a fantasy. In abstracto people speak of the new spirit, they know that it must come. But they run for dear life when faced with the concrete spirit. But it is a serious matter to look at the concrete path of this new spirit. There are many today, for example, who attack spiritual science from the standpoint of their supposed Christianity, who do not want to recognize how this spiritual science provides the most vital foundations for a revival of Christianity; how Christianity will live into the future precisely because spiritual science will again teach the living Christ and the event of Golgotha as a historical fact from spiritual scientific research. A large number of theologians have come to the point of no longer teaching this Christ as the actual meaning of the earth, but rather to make him the “simple man of Nazareth”. Spiritual Christianity will be re-established through spiritual science. But those who are afraid today, precisely because of the Christian foundations, should be told: Christianity is built on such firm foundations that there is no need to fear it in the face of spiritual science, any more than there is need to fear the discovery of the air pump and other things — and thus also not the teaching of repeated earthly lives or the doctrine of fate, as spiritual science presents them. Christianity is so strong that it can absorb everything that comes from spiritual science. But whether all of today's 'bearers of the Christian faiths are so strong is another question, but also a serious one.

We have to think in global terms, that's what this so-called world war has drummed into us. Many people think similarly about our Europe and its culture as a Japanese diplomat, whose words I would like to share with you. This Japanese diplomat, who is an educated man, said:

One may think of this content as one wants: This is how one thinks in the world, and we have every reason to look at these thoughts as at facts. It is truly most unfortunate when, on the part of those who ought to be familiar with the conditions of spiritual life – allow me to characterize them – the objections that have been so often and repeatedly described keep coming up, for example, the objection: You can't check what the spiritual researcher says. For example, a booklet was recently published by a gentleman who lives not far from here: 'Rudolf Steiner as Philosopher and Theosophist'. I would just like to point out one aspect of the spirit and logic that prevails there. There is a nice sentence: 'I may have to become a historian, physicist or chemist in order to be able to check things independently. But I cannot verify the theosophical truths unless I am clairvoyant'. That is, he says, historians, physicists and chemists claim all sorts of things; if you want to check these, you just have to become a historian, physicist or chemist. I say: if you want to check spiritual-scientific things, you have to become a spiritual scientist. What does the gentleman say? “I just might have to become a historian, physicist or chemist in order to be able to check things independently. But I cannot verify the theosophical truths unless I am a seer.” Of course! I cannot verify the results of chemical research either unless I become a chemist. But one can become a chemist. But one does not want to become a spiritual scientist. So one says something very strange: I must be able to test, but to be able to test without somehow getting involved in the methods of testing. The question for this gentleman, as he himself says, as you will soon hear, is not whether one can decide when one has appropriated the reasons for the decision, but: “The question is whether they have been or can be verified by me, and that, apart from the formal logical criticism, I must deny.” Well, I readily admit that he must deny it. But just as I admit that one must become a chemist in order to be able to verify the results of chemical research, so everyone must set out on the path of spiritual research in order to verify spiritual scientific truths. But that man rejects that. His whole writing is actually characterized by this logic. And much of the distorting influence brought to bear on spiritual science is based on this logic. There really are better things to do than to concern oneself with such objections.

But it would be particularly fitting for this German nation, this sorely tried German nation, to think about how it should relate to the very foundations of intellectual life. I can point to a few sentences that P. Terman Grimm, the brilliant art historian, wrote in 1858 in his essay on Schiller and Goethe. He wrote more than 60 years ago: “The true history of Germany is the history of the intellectual movements in the nation. Only where enthusiasm for a great idea has stirred the nation and set the frozen forces in motion, are deeds done that are great and luminous.” Should we not be able to take such words to heart today? Or the words that Herman Grimm - certainly no revolutionary - wrote in 1858: ”The names of German emperors and kings are... not milestones for the progress of the people.” He meant that the milestones for the progress of the people are the deeds in the field of thought, of thought that goes into the spiritual.

Never has the German been more in need of adhering to this than in this time of hardship and trial. And that is why we can ask our contemporaries today to look to their great ancestors so that we can become their worthy descendants. Should the beliefs of the German people's ancestors, which they expressed in their spiritual life, not apply to the present day? Should we not continue to develop this spiritual striving instead of stopping at mere words and quoting them? Those who merely quote Goethe today do not understand him; only those who develop him further understand him. Those who merely quote Johann Gottlieb Fichte are doing something nonsensical if they do not develop him further in the spiritual life. You have heard how the world speaks about European intellectual life. In the world, one must learn to recognize that the German, in turn, has the will to look at the actual milestones of the progress of his people. In this world our ancestors, the great pillars of German intellectual life, were often called dreamers. They were misunderstood, just as today what speaks of the spirit is described as fantasy or something else. But there were still people who knew how what was striven for in the spirit was based in reality. And at an important moment, Johann Gottlieb Fichte said to the people: What the others say, that ideas cannot directly intervene in practical life, we idealists know that as well, perhaps better than the others; but that life must be oriented towards them, we know that in advance. - He pointed to the practice of life and said: Those who do not understand this belong to those who are not included in the plan of the world. So may these people be granted sunshine and rain in due course and a good digestion and, if possible, some good thoughts.

It depends on the spirit in which one looks up to the spiritual life of the great bearers of the German spirit. Reality, not abstract judgment, will decide this. If the descendants of these German ancestors have a sense of the true practice of the spirit, then the people who preceded us in this practice of the spirit will not have been dreamers. But if we fail to penetrate into the realities of the practice of the spirit, then they will not become dreamers through themselves, but through us or through our descendants, who want to know nothing of the true German spirit. Let the German people beware lest they make their great ancestors, of whom the world has so often said that they were dreamers, into dreamers through our fault, through our lack of appreciation for the spirit that has been invoked and conjured up in German intellectual life! May he gain followers! This is the last word I wish to speak to you in the context of my current disputes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone who looks at the building in the neighborhood that is dedicated to the so-called Goetheanum, a free university for spiritual science that aims to serve the spiritual and cultural interests of the future, may initially be struck by the peculiar forms and style that confront them. One might have various objections to what one sees there. Those who are involved in the construction will be able to understand such objections, that it is a preliminary attempt, if they arise from goodwill. But a certain question must be raised about this building, which is characteristic of everything that the spiritual movement wants and strives for, of which this building is supposed to be a representative. If it had been necessary, in the usual way, to erect an independent building somewhere for a certain spiritual movement, for a certain kind of spiritual activity, then one would probably have turned to this or that architect, to this or that artist, and one might have conferred with them about what was to be done in such a building, and then a building would have been erected in some antique, Renaissance or other style, in which this spiritual-scientific activity was to find its home. There would only have been an external relationship between the forms within and around the building dedicated to this spiritual activity, and the activity itself. This was not possible with this spiritual movement. The aim here was to create an outer shell for a particular spiritual current that, in its entirety and in every detail, even the most insignificant, seemed to have been born out of the entire thinking, feeling and willing of this spiritual movement itself. The point was to create something in the external forms, down to the most minute detail, which is an external expression of the inwardly willed in the same way as a word or anything else that is intended to express the content of this spiritual movement itself. In this matter one could not turn to some existing style, to some formal language that has been handed down historically. What is visible to the eye in the structures had to be created from the same spiritual foundation from which the content of the world view is drawn. This is not only the innermost motivation of the spiritual-scientific movement, which also calls itself anthroposophical, but also of the whole way in which this movement conceives of its task, its paths and its goals in relation to the great demands of the present civilized world.

This spiritual movement does not want some abstract theory, a science that only occupies the intellect; it does not want to be something that can only serve the one-sided satisfaction of the inner soul's interests; it wants to be something that can indeed give the most intimate satisfaction to those longings of the human soul that go to a world view. But it wants to anchor this Weltanschhauung so firmly in reality that it can intervene in all practical life. And so it is that what we were able to achieve alone at first was the direct creation of building and art forms for our cause, which are characteristic of this whole movement. In this particular sphere it has intervened in the most practical matters; but this spiritual movement will seek ways and indicate goals which will have an effect on all social and moral aspects of human coexistence, in the widest sense. Those who build on this spiritual science should not be unworldly idealists, but should become idealists who can allow what arises from their soul to flow directly into their practical life. And all that often goes so strangely in the thoughts of man should be harmonized with what is in man's innermost soul striving. The outer practice of life should become one with that through which man seeks his moral impulses, develops his social instincts, and engages in his religious worship. With such a view, however, this spiritual-scientific movement still stands today quite far removed from that which is striven for, willed, and even considered right by the broadest circles of today's educated people.

That this must be so, but also that it is necessary for such a spiritual movement to take its place in our modern civilization, can be seen when we turn our gaze to the way in which our whole life, in which we live today, has actually come together out of the most diverse currents. Today I would like to speak first of two main currents in our civilized life. We have today what we call our spiritual education, in which our religious convictions are rooted, in which our moral ideals arise, but in which our entire higher spiritual life is also rooted. We have that through which man is to educate his abilities and strengths for a spiritual education beyond the ordinary manual work. And we have, in addition to this, the practical activity of life, which has received such intensive impulses in recent centuries. We have around us a technology that has been inspired by our science but that also reaches deeply into social life. This technology has transformed modern civilized life in a way that would certainly have been completely incomprehensible to a person eight or nine centuries ago.

If we now ask ourselves where our intellectual and cultural life comes from, a life that not only dominates our higher schools but also unfolds its impulses down to our elementary schools, and where, on the other hand, our practical life, permeated by such an extensive technology, comes from, we get an answer that the man of the present still gives little account of. But one need only – and we will discuss this in more detail in the third lecture – consider what, so to speak, forms the basis of our Western civilization, especially its higher spiritual part, one need only look at Christianity in the broadest sense, so one will be able to say, even from a superficial world-historical point of view, If we look for the origin of our Christian views and convictions, which have shaped so much of our general intellectual outlook and convictions, and if we look for the origin of these beliefs and convictions, much more than we are willing to admit today, we will eventually come across the path that Christianity took from the Orient to the Occident. And one can continue to look around for the thread that one has gained in such a way, and one will find that those paths that arise when one traces back our spiritual education - those paths that lead into Latin-Roman, into Greek, from which our spiritual education still clearly shows its inner — that these paths ultimately lead to the special state of mind, to the special constitution of the soul, through which, millennia ago, before prehistoric times, our educational life, which is more directed towards the inner, the soul-spiritual, originated from the Orient. Only because this educational life, this inner spiritual view, has changed so much over the centuries and millennia, we no longer notice today how it derives its origin from what, as I said, took its origin before pre-Christian millennia from a state of mind that has become quite alien to today's civilized man. To understand this long journey, we must not only go back to what external historiography, which can be proven by documents, offers, we must go beyond what this historiography can say, and go back to prehistoric times. This is quite difficult for the modern man. For he thinks in his innermost being that he has “made such wonderful progress” in spiritual things in the course of the last few centuries, perhaps only in the very last century, that everything that lies in the times just mentioned must be referred to the realm of the childlike, the primitive.

But anyone who is able to see the ancient culture of the Orient clearly, without being clouded by such prejudices, will see that, although civilization and intellectual development were substantially different in pre-Christian times in the Orient, they offered human souls very intense spiritual content. But these were achieved in a completely different, I would say radically different, way than what is achieved today to influence people who are to acquire a higher education at secondary schools.

In the ancient Orient, anyone who was to acquire a higher intellectual culture had to undergo a complete transformation of their entire human being after being chosen by the leaders and directors of the educational institutions concerned. I am speaking of the educational institutions of this ancient Orient. They are cognitively accessible to the spiritual science that is being discussed here; but if one is unprejudiced enough, if one has a certain courage of thought and cognition, then one can also deduce from what has been handed down historically what was there prehistorically. One must speak of these educational institutions in such a way that what appears separately in us has an inner unity there. These educational institutions, to which everything that we actually still carry within us today refers, but in a significantly transformed form, were at the same time what we call a church today, but also what we call a school today, and were at the same time what we call an art institution today. Art, science, and religion formed a unity in the older human civilizations. And anyone who was to be developed in these educational institutions had to bring their whole being to development. They had to transform their whole being. They had to adopt a different form of thinking from the one that is effective in everyday life. He had to devote himself to contemplative thinking. He had to get used to dealing with thinking in the same way as one otherwise deals with the external world. But he also had to get used to transforming his entire emotional and volitional life. It is difficult to imagine today what was striven for in this direction. For how do we actually think about our lives? We admit: the child, that must be developed. The abilities and powers with which it is endowed when it comes into the world must be developed through education. Now, the child cannot educate itself; the others, the adults, initially have the view that the child's abilities and powers must be developed. And we also make the child different in terms of his thinking, feeling and will than when he is born into the world. But if we now expect the human being to continue this development even when he has already come into his own will, when others no longer take care of his development out of their own views, then the present human being finds this a strange expectation; for one should only be developed as long as one cannot take charge of this development oneself, cannot take it into one's own hands. Once one comes to a certain freedom with regard to one's own development, then one abandons evolution. This is the intellectual arrogance in which we live today. We think in the moment when we would be in a position to take our development into our own hands, we are already finished, and we place ourselves in the world as finished people.

Such a view did not exist within that civilization, but rather, the human being was developed further and further. And just as the child is able to recognize, feel, and do more and more after going through a certain training, as if there were a kind of awakening in the soul, so there is also such an awakening for the further development that the human being can now take into his own hands. The oriental mystery school student was educated for this awakening in soul activities, which were higher than the ordinary ones in the same sense that the higher abilities of adults are higher than those of a child. And it was believed that only the one who has gone through this later awakening in the best sense of the word in life is capable of judging the highest matters of life. And one was not prepared there merely to be a person who, when he reflects, when he develops a certain inner feeling and perception, feels satisfied through the knowledge of his connection with a spiritual world. No, it was not only the ability to develop a worldview that was developed there, but also those abilities through which social and outwardly technical life was guided, through which human coexistence was directed. The whole of life was influenced by spiritual education and development.

It is so difficult for us to place ourselves back in the prevailing situation in the Orient thousands of years ago, at the starting point of our more recent human development, because our whole soul constitution has changed with the further development of humanity, because we have come to different feelings and views about life. For those people who were steeped in the spiritual development I have just hinted at, it was instinctive to move towards such a transformation of the human being. These people's instincts were different. They tended towards such a vision of spiritual life after a certain transformation. Those who did not themselves undergo such training looked up, by virtue of the instincts that were also present in them, to what those who had been trained could give them. They followed them in the training of their inner soul life. But they also followed them in the ordering of their social life, in their attitude to the life of the whole.

The instincts that led to such a life have been transformed just as much as the special soul instincts of the child have been transformed in the adult in the context of today's overall culture of humanity. But through these instincts, in connection with what had been absorbed from the teachings of those educational institutions that can truly be called mysteries, there arose a human soul-disposition that could not but lead to seeking what is at the core of the human being, not here in the sphere of life that includes the human body, but to direct this whole view of life, also to rise, as it were instinctively, in the popular consciousness, to the higher man in man, to that in man which is essentially spiritual-soul-like, to that in man which, although it appears in the sensual body for the time between birth and death, is eternal in itself and belongs to a spiritual world, into which one instinctively looked. Something superhuman, if I may use this expression, which has become somewhat questionable through the followers of Nietzsche, something superhuman was seen as the essence of man. What man looked at as his own nature was something that went beyond this ordinary human being. In this respect, education was great: seeking out the human being in his essence in a spiritual-soul realm, which finds expression only in the physical, reaching out from the spiritual-soul world into the whole human being, directing this human being in his most material expressions from the spiritual-soul realm.

In many metamorphoses, through many transformations, what came about as the content of spiritual education was then worked out in the Orient and came to Greece in many transformations. There it appears, I might say, filtered. While in the oldest Greek period, which Friedrich Nietzsche called the tragic age of the Greeks, we can still see something of such a directing of the whole human being to the higher human being, in the later Greek period what can be called, in a more comprehensive sense, the dialectical, the purely intellectual essence of the human being emerges. The whole rich and intensely all-human content of an original culture was, as it were, filtered and further and further filtered, and in the most diluted state it came over into our age. And so it forms the one current of our life, which went right up to the spiritual and soul-filled human being and gave the human being an awareness through which he felt, in every moment of life, in the presence of the giver and in the most menial of tasks, as an external expression of the spiritual and soul-filled human being.

We shall see in the third lecture that the Mystery of Golgotha, from which Christianity emerged in its development on this earth, stands as a fact in itself, which can be grasped in different ways in different ages. But that from which the next understanding of this Mystery of Golgotha was shaped was what had been brought over from the Orient in the form of education. And in fact, in all that we still summon up today to comprehend Christianity, there lives that which is the last, albeit intellectually diluted, experience of the Orient. There is a certain idiosyncrasy to this entire soul configuration, which lives in us only in its final metamorphosis. And this idiosyncrasy must be sought in what follows.

As great and powerful as this world view is in terms of rising to the superhuman in man and descending to what Western civilization has risen to and become great in, this oriental civilization could never have done so. It could produce the superhuman, the spiritual-soul, it could not produce anything else. It is something I have already hinted at in other contexts here. Just at the time when the last metamorphosis of Oriental spiritual life began to take root in the West, a new spiritual life began to take shape, a spiritual life that has indeed produced enormous blossoms in our time, but blossoms of a completely different kind than the Oriental spiritual life just described. Let us look at these other blossoms.

I would like to point out the following fact again. As I said, I have already mentioned it here from other points of view. If we look through the current handbooks to see how many people live on the earth, we are told that about 1500 million people inhabit the earth. If we look at what is being worked on within human civilization, if we look at the human resources that are active in our human being and human life, then, strangely enough, we have to say something different. We would actually have to say that the Earth works as if it were inhabited not just by 1500 million people, but by 2200 million people. For three to four centuries, our world of machines has been working in such a way that work is being done that could also be done by people. We are replacing human labor with machine power. And if you convert what our machines achieve into human labor, you find, based on an eight-hour working day, that our work on earth involves seven to eight times a hundred million people, that is, not real people, but human labor, which is raised by machines.

This is something that is being introduced into human civilization by those spiritual forces that have arisen from the Western world, those spiritual forces that could never have developed in a straight line from that inner culture of spirit and soul that had so magnificently risen to the superhuman, to the higher human in the human, to the spiritual-soul human being. This culture remained at the level of certain heights of the soul. It did not penetrate what we call practical life today. It could never have brought dead metal or other material into such a context that a man would work among people, not a superman, but an underman, a man who is actually a homunculus compared to people of flesh and blood, a mechanism that introduces into human culture what otherwise people could introduce. This is the essence of our Western intellectual life. It is all the more characteristic of this Western intellectual life the farther west we go, where the mechanical man, the sub-human, has emerged from this intellectual life, just as the spiritual man, the super-human, has emerged from the Oriental intellectual life.

The fact that such a thing could be created in the West is not an isolated phenomenon of civilization. It is connected with the whole development of perception, feeling and thinking. The people who brought this homunculus into being are, in their whole state of mind, of course, greater in the other direction than the Oriental man. Today, one cannot understand life if one cannot see through this contrast in all its intensity. For on the one hand, this modern man still carries within him the last metamorphosis of that which came to him from the Orient, and on the other hand, he has been absorbing for centuries what is most essential to Western spiritual life. A balance has not yet been achieved. They stand there like two separate currents flowing apart: the current of the superman, though much changed, and the current of the subhuman, though only in its beginning. And the modern man, the man of the present, when he awakens to the consciousness that in his soul these two currents live abruptly, he suffers mentally, spiritually and probably also physically from the discord that arises from it. These are matters that become so deeply entwined in the unconscious and subconscious that something quite different from the actual cause enters not only into the consciousness of the person, but even into the constitution of his body. The modern human being finds himself nervous, finds himself dissatisfied with circumstances. There are hundreds of ways in which modern man feels a discord between himself and his surroundings, and how this discord is also expressed in his physical health. What has been mentioned is behind this. Behind this lies the great question: How can we, for the civilization of the future, harmonize what produced the subhuman with what lives in us in its last phase as the legacy of a civilization that has led to the spiritual-soul human being?

The spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy seeks to take on board what is contained in the forces of our civilization, as I have just mentioned. It sees as a necessary goal, borne by the most significant demands of the time, a balancing between the soul forces that have led in one direction and the soul forces that have led in the other direction. And it is aware of how tremendously necessary and significant it is for humanity to find the paths to this goal. Instinctively, I have named the oriental spiritual life.

This spiritual life was born out of the instincts of ancient man. We have received it as an heirloom. But we have received it in an already intellectualized state; it has lived its way into our civilization in concepts and ideas of a rather abstract nature. For we no longer have the instincts that the former bearer of this spiritual life had. No matter how much one may fantasize about it, the fact remains that the present-day human being should return to naivety, that he should become instinctive again. In one respect, one is right to make such a demand. But naivety will express itself in a different way than before. The instinctive life will go in different directions. And to demand that we should become like people of previous millennia is the same as demanding that adults should play like children. No, we cannot go back to satisfy our deepest soul needs, into the civilization of past millennia, nor can we, if we do not want to fall into decadence, call out as Westerners “ex oriente lux”; no, we must not call out, the light comes to us from the Orient. For the light that is there today has also undergone many metamorphoses, and we cannot indulge in the illusion that what can still be found somewhere in the Orient today represents a spirituality that could somehow fruitfully reach into our civilization. It was a decadence of the worst kind when a theosophical movement asserted itself out of the religious and cultural needs of the Occident, out of the machine age, which had also formed a mechanistic world view that cannot satisfy man. It was decadence of the worst kind that one went into the area that today's decadent oriental succession of an intellectual life of earlier times has. When Indian culture was sought out today in order to incorporate it into Western theosophy, it showed just how barren one had become, how the creative powers no longer stir from one's own spiritual life, how one could only be great in the mechanistic, but how one could not find one's own way into those areas that the soul needs for its view of the true spiritual essence of man.

This tendency, by the way, underlies today's life all too much. Do we not see how those who are dissatisfied with present-day Christianity often inquire: What was Christianity like in the past? What was early Christianity like? Let us do it again as the early Christians did. As if we had not progressed since then, as if we did not need a new understanding of Christianity! Oh, the characteristic of infertility is everywhere, the impossibility of one's own creation. No, that is not what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants: borrowing from some ancient culture or from the present-day succession of an ancient culture.

Particularly when one grasps the concrete reality of the roots of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, it is easy to see what has been said. You can hear how the present-day Oriental, I would even say, how old methods are reproduced, seeks the path to the spiritual in a certain breathing process, in a regulation of breathing, seeks to develop the human constitution through which one finds inner powers of knowledge and feeling and will, in order to ascend into the spiritual world, where the spiritual-soul human being is found, where true self-knowledge is. The Oriental of today does what the Oriental has always done in earlier centuries and millennia for such a path: he descends from the mere intellectual life of the head into the life of the whole human being. He knows the inner organic connection between the way we breathe in and the way we breathe out — I will speak of this again in the next few days — and the process of our imagining and thinking. But he also knows that thinking and imagining grow out of the breathing process. And so he wants to go back to the roots of thinking, to the breathing process. He seeks the path up to the spiritual world in a regulation of the breathing process. We cannot imitate this path. If we were to imitate it, we would sin against our human constitution, which has become quite different. The inner structure of our brain and nervous system is different from that from which the instinctive spiritual culture of the Orient emerged. If we were to consider it right today to devote ourselves only to a regulated breathing process, we would be denying the intellectual life. We would be denying what we are constituted for today.

In order to ascend the paths into the spiritual world, we must undergo other metamorphoses. We no longer have to go back from thinking to bodily processes such as breathing; we have to develop thinking itself. That is why today's spiritual science, living at the height of its time, must speak of an education of the intellectual life, but not of the intellectual life that is almost the only one known today. It is precisely this intellectual life that has made us dry and arid, as if parched, for the full scope of life. No matter how much the one-sided intellectualism is railed against from all sides in the present day, nothing is being done to really fight it. One has the feeling that mere concepts, even those taken from serious and conscientious science, leave the soul cold and do not lead it along the paths of true life. On the other hand, however, one does not find the possibility of directing this intellectual life in a direction that can be satisfying, because one wants to avoid precisely that which the spiritual science meant here must regard as the right thing for the modern human being. The modern human being cannot, when he realizes the dryness, the sobriety, the one-sidedness of mere intellectualism, draw on some, as one often says, pre-thought, primitive, elementary life to improve himself as an intellectual person. He cannot, I would say, seek in a life of blind rage, which one does not understand, that which he wants to externally affix to intellectual civilization.

Therefore, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks, through the practice-based development of the soul, that which modern man actually longs for in order to truly satisfy his soul. I have described in detail in the second part of my “Occult Science”, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in other of my writings, how this path is to be followed in a way that is appropriate for Western man. In principle, I will only hint at the fact that it is a matter of taking hold of the soul life in such a way that one avoids developing concepts, notions and ideas in the highest degree, that one does not develop only the life of thought in a one-sided way, but that one exercises the soul in such a way that the most living feelings are connected with the thoughts themselves, which arise, combine and separate. While today the one-sided intellectualist is sober in his thought life, but also lets this thought life wander in the alien fields of science or other fields and otherwise thoughtlessly lives in life, that which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science calls its practice seeks to deepen into thinking, but at this deepening of thinking of thinking, so that one can rejoice, become angry, hate and love what one only thinks, how one hates and loves people, how one becomes angry at outer events, so that a whole inner life arises, arises in such liveliness as the outer life is. The books mentioned are intended to bear witness to the fact that this can be done systematically.

But then, when a person seeks out such paths, when he really develops the forces of knowledge, feeling and will that otherwise lie dormant within him, when he therefore takes his development in hand not from the body, as in the ancient oriental culture, in a regulated breathing process, but from the soul and from the spirit, then he finds the way into the spiritual world. And what forces does he apply? He applies the forces through which his civilization has become great. He applies the forces that he also applied in building his machines, in developing his mechanistic Copernican, Galilean, Keplerian, Newtonian astronomical conceptions. The powers of imagination and ingenuity that are developed by our minds and souls in our machines, what lives in our astronomy, in our chemistry, what lies in our social life, all this is being cultivated. The Oriental had none of this. He could not have continued his spiritual life to the point of developing these powers of the soul. He had to go to the breathing of the body in order to follow the path of knowledge. We must start from the point where we start in our outer practical life. We must proceed from the same soul and spiritual powers that live in our mechanistic culture, which has produced seven to eight hundred million specimens of the subhuman. We must develop a new orientation, that is, a vision of the higher, the eternal, the immortal human being from the most sensual, the most mechanical, from that which proves to be the path to the subhuman in our Western civilization.

However, not everything that wants to be part of modern civilization is appealing to modern people. For this modern man, he demands that the child should develop, because the child cannot yet make its own decision about its development. At the moment when he is supposed to make the decision himself, he no longer allows himself to be involved in the development; at that point he is done; at that point he allows himself to be elected to the city council, to parliament, because he knows everything. One knows everything. There is no need to descend to the development of abilities through which one knows something. One is a critic for everything, if only one has come to the awareness of one's arbitrariness, if only the others are no longer allowed to mess around in relation to development. This modern man must seek the way to ascend again to those heights where one finds the spiritual-soul man.

Now the fact of the matter is that for the time being the inner urge to seek this spiritual-soul-man, to tread the path to these realizations, is still a renunciation-filled one, for this path demands a life that certainly takes place in pain and suffering, a life that not everyone has to live today, not everyone can live, nor does everyone need to live. But just as not everyone can become a chemist, but the results of chemistry can be useful for all people, just as not everyone can become an astronomer, but the results of astronomy can appeal to all souls, so there can be few spiritual researchers, but the results of this spiritual research can be grasped by ordinary common sense, as I have often said here. The few spiritual researchers can communicate their spiritual insights, and common sense will understand them. But that is precisely what people today deny. They come and say: What you spiritual researchers communicate to us may be beautiful fantasies; but we dissect it logically, we do not accept it, because it does not show itself before our human understanding. We have not yet trained ourselves to see higher things.

One does experience very strange things in this area. Just recently another pamphlet has appeared about what I, as an anthroposophically oriented worldview, have to represent before humanity today. A man who is, well, a “university professor” says, where he gives me the brush-off as a philosopher and, as he says, as a theosophist: Yes, there Steiner claims that one must also become a chemist in order to understand chemical things, a physicist in order to understand physical things; one can admit that to him. But now it is very strange how this gentleman behaves strangely. He says: Everyone can agree with what chemists claim about this or that, because if he becomes a chemist himself, he will see that it is correct; everyone can agree with what physicists claim, because if he becomes a physicist himself, he will see that what physicists say is correct. But to understand what spiritual science says, one would have to develop special abilities.

But I am not saying anything else. Just as a person must become a chemist in order to judge chemistry, and as a person must become a physicist in order to judge physics, so a person must become a scholar of spiritual science in order to decide on spiritual science. But now, continuing his text, that strange - perhaps not so strange - university professor says: It is not a matter of what Steiner claims only being justified before people trained in spiritual science, but of it having to be justified before me! That is, it must be justified before someone who not only has no idea about it, but also does not want to get one.

This is, of course, a “common sense” written in quotation marks, which is not good at understanding what spiritual science has to offer. The unbiased common sense will grasp it. Yes, in the future people will perhaps think quite differently about these things than they are accustomed to thinking in many circles today. The world is there. The philosophers have always argued about the world. Well, philosophers will still have common sense. And one can even say, if one is unbiased: philosophy is better than its reputation. But philosophers argue. And if you are unprejudiced, you can even grant a certain acumen in the philosophical field to someone who says the opposite of what another is saying, again out of a certain acumen. Yes, if you are unprejudiced here in this field, you come to a very strange judgment about common sense. It is there. People generally speak in this common sense. But it is not at all suitable for understanding the world, otherwise philosophers would not need to argue. This ordinary common sense does not seem to be at all suitable for grasping the world that is presented to the senses externally, just as it is. Try to see if it can grasp what spiritual science has to say, and you will see: the way will open up for you to grasp precisely that. It is wishy-washy, not even mere prejudice, to say: humanitarians also claim different things; one this or the other that. This is said without knowledge of the facts. If one gets to know the facts, one will no longer claim this.

Of course, many a prejudice and many a preconception will have to be overcome if the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here is to be integrated into modern life. But it will have to be integrated. For the way will have to be found to combine the two spiritual currents you have been shown today. We cannot become reactionaries in order to return to earlier intellectual formations. We must place ourselves in that which the scientific, mechanistic age has produced. But we must spiritualize the forces that have brought forth a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Giordano Bruno, a Röntgen, a Becquerel and so on down to our own day, we must spiritualize these forces so that through the same forces of the human soul, through which we build machines, we also ascend to the knowledge of the spiritual-soul human being. Then we will no longer merely speak of the spirit, but we will be able to give content to the striving for the spirit.

This is what is so disturbing to the deeper observer of contemporary civilization: people today talk a lot about the spirit, but they give no content to this talk about the spirit. This gives rise to world views on the one hand, and to the practice of life in an unorganized way connected with these world views on the other, just as our spiritually scientific world view would be out of place in a house built in an old architectural style. Our spiritually scientific world view wants to live in structures that are born of itself. It should create and can create in such a way that it is able to permeate the external material life down to the technical details and the social interconnections. Then this spiritual science will be able to become the bearer of a civilization that finds the right ways to the goals that have been hinted at today. Then this spiritual science will no longer allow that life to flourish, of which one can say: Well, some strive towards the spirit again; they demand that the person who works hard in the factory no longer works only in the factory, but that he has enough time left over to devote to the spirit as well. Oh, no, spiritual science does not demand that one has to work in the factory and, when one locks the door behind oneself, then steps out of the factory to find spiritual life there. No, spiritual science demands the opposite: that when you enter the factory to go to work, you carry the spirit with you, so that every machine is imbued with the spirit of that which also carries the world view to the highest heights of knowledge, of the immortal. Spiritual science does not want to leave time for the spirit, but to imbue all time with what man can find as the content of his spirit.

Now, people often cry out for the spirit today. A book about socialism has just been published - there are all sorts of heartfelt and sometimes sensible views - by Robert Wilbrandt, a professor at the University of Tübingen. It sounds: Yes, but we will not get anywhere with socialism if we do not find the new spirit, the new soul. So on the last pages of the book, the cry for the spirit, for the soul! But if you take such a man, such a personality, to the point where the spirit is given content, where you not only interpret in the abstract in terms of spirit and soul, where you speak of spiritual and soul content as science otherwise speaks of natural content, then the personality in question withdraws, because they do not have the courage to profess the real spirit that is full of content. And so we see it in many. They cry out for the spirit. But when the spirit seeks a real content, they do not come forward. They remain in merely pointing to an abstract union of human souls with the spiritual. This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks as a path: the path to real spiritual content, to a real spiritual world, out of our own organic powers of knowledge as a goal: to develop the merely inorganic two currents that have been joined together in us, Orientalism and Occidentalism, to form a striving that finds its way out of our own striving, both down into the mechanism and up into the highest spirituality.

I will conclude today by saying only the following, in anticipation of the further elaboration of this theme that I will give tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, when it will be possible to characterize many things more broadly than I could in today's introduction. The call for a new spirituality is echoing today in many hearts and minds, and in a certain way people already sense that our misfortune, which has manifested itself so terribly in the last five years, is connected in the outer world with the fact that our spirit has reached an impasse. That a wall must be broken through in order to make spiritual progress. There is a sense that we cannot make progress in the social, the political, or the outwardly technical spheres without a new spirit. A man who may not always have played a very favorable role, but perhaps a wiser one than some of his colleagues among the “statesmen” - I say that in quotation marks when I speak of statesmen today - in recent years, has now also - statesmen and generals write war memoirs today, after all - has now also written his war memoirs. They end with the following words:

“War will continue, albeit in a modified form. I believe that future generations will call the great drama that has dominated the world for five years not world war, but world revolution...”

These are the words of Czernin, the Austrian statesman. So at least one person can see how things are connected, even if only to a very limited extent. And he continues:

”... and we shall know that this world revolution has only begun with the world war. Neither Versailles nor Saint Germain will create a lasting work. In this peace lies the disintegrating seed of death. The convulsions that shake Europe are not yet diminishing. Like a mighty earthquake, the subterranean rumblings continue. Soon, the earth will open again and again, here or there, hurling fire against the sky; again and again, events of an elemental nature and force will sweep devastatingly across the lands. Until all that is reminiscent of the madness of this war and the French peace has been swept away.

Slowly, with unspeakable agony, a new world will be born. Future generations will look back on our time as if it were a long, evil dream, but day always follows the darkest night. Generations have sunk into the grave, murdered, starved, succumbed to disease. Millions have died in the quest to destroy and annihilate, with hatred and murder in their hearts.

But other generations are rising, and with them a new spirit. They will build up what war and revolution have destroyed. Every winter is followed by spring. That, too, is an eternal law in the cycle of life, that resurrection follows death.

Blessed are those who will be called upon to help build the new world as soldiers of labor.

Here, too, the call for the new spirit arises from the limited statesmanship of the old days. Now, this call for the new spirit must only be understood and take root truly and earnestly enough in people's souls. For even the most external events in life are connected with the most internal ones, the most external material events with the most internal spiritual experiences. And when we look at what the spirit, which reached its peak at the beginning of the 20th century, has lived out in the events of recent years, we will understand that the call for a new spiritual life must come true. With this new spiritual life, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to have its ways and goals connected to the building of the world, just as those spiritual endeavors that fight it are visibly connected to the terrible events of recent years.

Just recently I read a remarkable lecture that was given in the Baltic region – note the date – on May 1, 1918. A physicist's lecture on May 1, 1918, ends with the words: “The world war has shown that the spiritual aspirations of the present day, the scientific work of the present day, are still too isolated.” The world war – roughly speaking, this physicist says – has taught us that in the future, what is being worked on in the scientific laboratories must be in an inner organic connection, in a continuous inner exchange of ideas, with what is being worked on in the general staffs. The most intimate alliance must be sought – so this physicist says – between science and the general staff. He sees the salvation of the future in this!

As one can see, the science of the past can even view alliances that are formed between it and the most destructive forces of humanity as an ideal. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to form an alliance between its spiritual striving and all truly constructive forces of human civilization.

Before I proceed to the important consequences of spiritual science, which deal with the moral, social and religious forces of the human being, that are particularly relevant to the present day, I would like to insert a consideration today of what spiritual science has to say about the physical and mental health of the human being. Such a consideration as today's is justified because, after all, a person can only set humane and dignified moral goals, set social tasks and bring forth a corresponding religious life from the depths of his soul if these goals and achievements are based on what can be called his physical, mental and spiritual health.

You will assume from the outset that when we speak about the foundations of health in the spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical sense, then the spiritual and soul factors that come into consideration will be particularly touched upon. Now, however, such a consideration immediately encounters one of the oldest and, one might say, most controversial questions of human world view: the question of the connection between the soul and spirit in the human being and the physical body in general. Much has been thought about and much has been investigated with the means of various scientific fields regarding this question: How does the spiritual-soul of man actually relate to the physical body?

The spiritual science meant here must take the view that it cannot regard this question, as it is usually asked, from the outset as a correctly asked one. The usual question is: How does the human spirit or soul relate to the body, to the physical organization? This does not take into account whether the soul condition and soul strength that we can call the arbitrary of the human being, might not perhaps found a special relationship between spirit and body in different ways in different people, whether certain circumstances might not intervene through precisely these forces that the human being develops in his soul, in his physical organization. And this question can actually only be treated by a spiritual-scientific consideration, such as the one I took the liberty of presenting to you yesterday. For if we consider what has led the science of the West to its triumphs in the sense in which it was characterized yesterday, we must say that it is not an element that leads to the human being, but rather an element that, in a certain respect, actually removes us from the human being.

What, in particular, does the scientist who has adopted the principles of the last three to four centuries strive for in his science? He strives in particular to gain such ideas about external things and also about man, in which as little as possible, or even better, no human feelings and impulses of will interfere. The more one is able to keep apart from scientific observation everything that can be called subjective and personal, the more one believes that the ideal of this scientific observation has been fulfilled. The physicist and the biologist no longer believe that they can fulfil their task if they mix anything into their findings that can only be grasped inwardly in the soul.

If I may recall what I characterized yesterday as an ideal of oriental world view, which admittedly belongs to a distant past, it must be said that since the whole person was brought up for that transformation, for that development of human nature, which in the Orient formed the basis of a world view, this method was the complete opposite of what appears to us today as a scientific ideal.

Now, when we devote ourselves to such things, we have to discard many of the prejudices that apply, I would say, as a matter of course. However, in a short time these will no longer be matters of course, but prejudices that have been created by the education of humanity over the last three to four centuries.

If we really delve into the fundamental character of what characterizes all our thinking, impregnated as it is with science, we find that only one part, one link in the whole of human nature, actually finds favor with this thinking today : that which may be called the intellectual element, the element that rises to thoughts free of feeling and will, that wants to add nothing from its own subjective human nature to this process of imagining. But as a result, the whole human being as such does not participate in the most important scientific work, but only that part of the human being that is the bearer of the intellectual soul life.

What I characterized yesterday as the truly Western striving for a spiritual-scientific world view wants to develop the soul forces that produce a world view out of the whole of human nature, without returning to oriental ideals. Therefore, yesterday I had to characterize the paths of knowledge that lead to such an anthroposophically oriented spiritual-scientific world view in the following way. While the man who is merely scientific develops intellectualized thinking through his experiments or his observations of nature, the one who wants to ascend to a spiritual-scientific view must draw purified feelings and purified will impulses from the depths of his soul life. He must indeed immerse himself in a world of thought. He must be able to work in an intellectual way just as only the most exact scientist can. But he stands in a different way to intellectuality with his humanity than this exact scientist does. He immerses himself in worlds of ideas, he immerses himself in that which otherwise only the pale, shadowy thought delivers. But just as one otherwise only participates in the events of external life with one's sympathies and antipathies, with one's whole emotional world, just as one otherwise only participates in the demands of life with one's will impulses, so in the case of someone who wants to seek the path into the spiritual world in the sense of this spiritual science, feeling, willing, sympathies and antipathies accompany thoughts and ideas. We connect an inner element of sympathy or antipathy, an inner volition, with the way in which the ideas work, how they relate to one another. We would otherwise only have this kind of connection with a person of flesh and blood, or with nature in a lesser sense, or we develop it when we are hungry or thirsty or when other tasks of ordinary life arise. The inner life is as active in the volition under the influence of hunger and thirst as it is in the feelings that one develops towards loved or hated people, as it is in the methods that are to lead to spiritual insight. The whole human being, with all their feelings and intentions, participates in these methods. This develops different insights, different relationships to the external world and also to other people than mere intellectual activity.

If the insights that become the content of spiritual science in this way – which, after all, are a closed book to the broadest sections of contemporary humanity, not because the spiritual scientists seal this book with seven seals, but because those who should approach this spiritual science so that they need not approach it, first seal it with the seven seals of their prejudices and their scorn and derision - when this content of spiritual science is then taken up by people, when the soul of the human being unites with it, it therefore also works differently than the content of mere intellectual knowledge. It takes hold of the whole soul of the human being directly. It pours energies and forces into the whole soul of the human being. And when the content of spiritual science is gained in such a way that it corresponds to the great world-law connections, then it pours, so to speak, the same forces into the human soul from which the human organism is built. For the human organism is built out of the forces of the world. Spiritual scientific knowledge, in turn, goes back to these forces of the world. Thus, there must be an inner harmony between what is recognized through spiritual science from the perspective of world law and what arises from the organization of the human being as the human being himself, in that the human being receives his own organization from the foundations of the world order.

But this has the consequence that there is a completely different relationship between what one takes in as the content of spiritual science and the whole development of the human being, and what only occupies the intellect, such as natural science or, as today, social science and the like, and this human being himself. But there is something that obscures this relationship. This makes it difficult for anyone who has not yet penetrated to the actual meaning of spiritual science to form a precise idea of such things. It must be said that just as the healthy nature of the human being is organized in a healthy way out of the world, so too is the content of spiritual science gained in a healthy way and can therefore, since it encompasses the whole human being, not only have an effect on the intellect but also on the whole human being. If one says this, then today, anyone who is a layperson in spiritual science will draw the following conclusion. He will say: Of course, I will hypothetically admit that you, as a spiritual scientist, draw healthy thoughts from your view of the world. Thoughts that are intellectual and shadowy have no effect on the human organism; yours are conceived with reference to the whole nature of man, they therefore have an effect on the human organism, and we shall be able to use them, let us assume hypothetically, in the sense of healthy human nature. Let us say, then, that the thoughts which you develop as healthy thoughts through your spiritual science will be used in such a way that we imbibe them and let them take effect in us, and then, like a medicine, they can work against the aberrations of human nature. |

However obvious this hypothesis may be, and however much credence it has found among certain superstitious people, it corresponds little to reality as I have just stated it. And here it is necessary, I might say, to touch on the foundation that must be laid in order to understand the interaction between healthy spiritual and mental life and healthy physical life in the right way. When a human being enters physical existence through birth or through conception from spiritual worlds, by clothing himself with a physical body, we see that what the soul and spirit takes on with this physical body needs time to take effect. The child arrives in the physical world with its predispositions. But it must grow up. We can observe how, from month to month, from year to year, from decade to decade, the physical organization first brings forth what is spiritually and soulfully predisposed in the human being. Those who, through the spiritual science referred to here, acquire the ability to penetrate into the real connection between the spiritual and soul life and the bodily and physical, come to the following realization, not through some kind of logical fantasy, but through a penetrating, very conscientious observation of life that is continued over long periods of time:

Just as the whole nature of the human being takes time to integrate as a spiritual-soul element of the physical organization, so everything that we take in spiritually and soulfully first takes time to integrate into the physical-bodily organization. So when I, as an eight-year-old child, or as a twenty-year-old, or only as a fifty-year-old, take in something of spiritual-soul content, when something of such content takes hold of my soul, then this content is, in relation to my bodily organization where it enters my soul, as young as the soul of a child in relation to the bodily organization, and such soul content takes time to take effect in the body. Therefore, one cannot hope that, in the manner of American thought healing, one can invent thoughts that are introduced into the person like a liquid medicine and that work immediately. No, the transformation that the spiritual-soul content undergoes as it increasingly penetrates the bodily-physical requires time. One spiritual-soul content needs less time, the other more, but time must elapse between the moment when a spiritual-soul content is taken up in the abstract, when we penetrate it cognitively, and the state when it has organized us thoroughly.

What I am telling you here is not just any old idea that can be carelessly tacked onto life's phenomena. Rather, it is something that is discovered as conscientiously as any laboratory or clinical result, and much more conscientiously. In such investigations, one starts out from the paths that ordinary, everyday spiritual assimilation undergoes in the human being, in that the human being can later conjure up from the depths of his soul that which he has once taken into that soul, in terms of memory. In the course of their lives, the vast majority of people simply bypass the paths that the soul life takes in relation to memory; they do not observe how it is quite differently experienced when we remember something that we experienced decades ago and something that we experienced three days ago. We certainly draw both from the depths of our soul. But what we experienced three days ago or even three years ago proves, to someone with the ability to observe such things, to be something that is drawn, I might say, from the shallower depths of our soul life, and is still entirely mental content. What one remembers as an older person from one's childhood experiences is what one brings up from the depths of the soul. If one observes the process, one sees how it is already intimately intertwined with the whole body, how it permeates our body like a soul blood, how it has strongly taken on the character of the forces that denote the habitual in us.

This, of course, is only the beginning of the detailed method by which it is observed how, over time, what we absorb as spiritual-mental content first unites with the physical body. From this you will realize how spiritual science must demand that its way of caring for physical and mental health be considered not only among the arts that have an immediate effect, but how it appeals to what, first of all, is child-rearing, and secondly, what is national education and national life. For spiritual science must work with foresight, I would say with a prophetic vision, with regard to human health.

If you see through what I am touching on here, you will only then realize what it means when spiritual-scientific impulses are incorporated into educational methods, when our children are actually educated in such a way that the educational impulses are kept in a spiritual-scientific sense; and then the things that are taught to children are imbued, not with spiritual-scientific theories – the world has no need to fear that – but with a spiritual-scientific attitude, with a spiritual-scientific disposition of soul, and above all with a spiritual-scientific pedagogical fire. This will penetrate the child's mind, and will then connect with the soul and physical organization, growing and, because it is healthy, merging with the human organization in a healthy way, making it healthy and strong, and resistant to external influences.

When the world once realizes the full significance of what spiritual science can achieve here, then gradually all the beautiful theories of infectious diseases and the like, which today are only viewed in a one-sided way, will not disappear, but they will become less important. Much more attention will be paid to the way in which bacilli and bacteria enter our organism than to how strong we have become in soul and spirit to resist these invasions. This strength in human nature will not require an external remedy, but the remedy that strengthens people internally from the spirit and from the soul through a healthy spiritual-scientific content. In this way, public health care is placed on a fundamentally different basis through spiritual science than anyone could have dreamt of, who believes that the salvation of human development can only lie in the continuation of current views.

Among many things, I would like to draw attention to just one, to which I have already drawn the attention of some prominent figures here in this city from other points of view. Today, for example, in education, in teaching, an enormous value is placed on the so-called contemplation, and rightly so, because within certain limits it is good to lead the child directly to the external or internal contemplation and to let his ideas and concepts be imagined by him in such a way that he draws them himself. But not everything that is needed for the child's development into a human being can be brought to it in this way. And so much must enter into the child merely by looking up to his educator, to his teacher as his authority, to the one who develops a certain fire in educating, in teaching, who transmits imponderables from himself to the child with his fire. There will then be some things that the child absorbs in the belief that the authority believes in them; but it does not yet understand them. Then the time may come, perhaps fifteen or twenty years after the child has left school, when he remembers: “You learned that then and didn't understand it. Now you have matured, now you are bringing it up from the depths of your soul. Now you understand it.” Anyone who is familiar with the soul life of a human being knows that such an understanding, mediated by later ripening, of what one has carried in one's soul for years, perhaps decades, develops forces that strengthen the human being inwardly; nothing pours such energy into the will from the innermost part of the soul as learning to understand something through one's own ripening power, something that one took in years ago on authority, on someone's saying. In this way, pedagogy can be combined with ideal and spiritual hygiene. When such far-reaching views are fully integrated into our public health care system, then the spiritual that is rooted in humanity will be able to truly unfold its energies, which are so beneficial for humanity. While everything we absorb through our intellect and its development is, so to speak, detached from the human being and therefore cannot have an effect on the human being, what is drawn from the whole human nature, the spiritual-scientific, can also have an effect on this whole human nature. And if, in the field of medicine, we look not only for momentary success but also for a system of health care that takes into account the laws of the world, and thus also the laws of time, we have the opportunity to work in this direction with tremendous benefit. Unfortunately, however, the nature of present-day humanity is such that it does not like to look at that which eludes the moment and which, I might say, goes into the great with its effect. Modern man would prefer to take leave of the laws of the world and become ill at will. You will understand that I do not mean this quite literally, but it is something that human nature tends towards. And then, again, he would like to be cured in the twinkling of an eye. But what must be borne in mind is that the strong inner energy should be developed in individual people's education, and indeed throughout their whole lives, in order to really bring to fruition the healing powers of the soul, of the spirit, in people. From this point of view, it will be seen that physical and mental health depend very much on the development of such a strong and vigorous soul life in people that this strong and vigorous soul life can actually intervene in the physical being.

To do this, it is necessary to broaden our perspective over longer periods of time. That which affects our intellect does not affect our will at the same time. And although we may never have influenced our will, we can strain our will at any age with ever so healthy ideas and thoughts, in order to act on our soul from the intellect, we will not succeed. For from the intellect, no spiritual-soul content can directly intervene in human nature. We must also influence the will. We influence the will through everything that arouses our interest in the world, that arouses our share, our loving participation in the world. People often go through the world, I would say, with a certain mental deficiency. Of course, there are also deeper causes, but one of the causes of imbecility is that such people have not understood how to develop a broad and deep interest in everything that lives and works around them when they were children, because this development of interest affects the will. And only when the will has been strengthened in this way can that which affects the intellect later gain influence over the whole human being. The worst thing that can happen to a person in terms of their physical and mental health is that their physical organization separates from their spiritual being. In mediumship, this separation of the physical organization of the human being from his soul and spiritual being is brought about in an almost experimental way. We see that the spiritual-soul being is virtually paralyzed, put to sleep for a certain time, so that the bodily-physical, with which, however, the spiritual is also always connected, seems to work automatically. Seen from the right point of view, mediumship is nothing more than a real illness, a real discord between the spiritual-mental, which has become quite unenergetic, and the physical-bodily, which therefore gains the upper hand. Therefore, mediumship, when it is radically extended, is always associated with the paralysis of the will, with the entire paralysis of the soul of the medium concerned. And since the moral can only arise from the soul's energy, there is also, as a rule, a certain moral decline associated with mediumship. It is precisely from the insight into the connection between spiritual and mental health and physical and bodily health that everything that is the dark side of mediumship can truly be seen.

If only those who judge mediumship without knowledge of the actual essence of spiritual science did not all too often lump spiritual science together with all the aberrations of the zeitgeist or of modern times in general, as I am pointing out here! It is certainly easier to appeal to spiritless mediumship to learn something about the spiritual world than to appeal to spiritual science, which demands effort. When one appeals to mediumship, one has the spirit reported by a medium, but first one has to eliminate the spirit. It is a convenient method to get to the spirit. Spiritual science, however, demands that one not switch off the spirit in another in order to learn something about the spirit, but that one bring the spirit within oneself to higher development and unfoldment, so that one can direct one's forces into the spiritual world and experience the peculiarities of the spiritual world there. If one were to look at spiritual science without prejudice, one would see how it is the universal remedy against such aberrations as those to which I have now alluded in a few words.

Thus, it can be said that health care is a necessary consequence of what spiritual science wants to bring into human development. But of course human nature is subject to a wide variety of influences. No one should interpret what I have discussed so far as if I meant that the cultivation of spiritual science should one day eliminate all diseases from the world. I certainly do not mean that at all. Diseases have their causes. The process of healing is more important than the knowledge of their causes. And here it is a matter of the fact that spiritual science also has something to say, not only about the care of health, which has spiritual scientific foundations, but that, as with all aspects of life, it also has something to say about medicine itself. It is a fact, though denied by many because they do not want to admit the truth on this point, but it nevertheless exists, that many people who have really thought things through and have gone through medical studies today, when they then feel abandoned to suffering humanity, are afflicted by the most bitter mental anguish because they then realize what demands the human organism makes on human insight when it strays from the healthy into the diseased, and how little can be gained for this medical work from the means and methods of knowledge of the purely scientific approach. The shadowy side of mere natural science observation is clearly shown in medicine, which, incidentally, also has a light side with regard to the observation of mere external nature. In medicine, the dark side is there. For one has only to consider the following: This natural science, it may be said once more, places its main emphasis on completely excluding the human being by looking at the world in an intellectualistic way and seeking its natural laws in an intellectualistic way through experiments. One learns only what can be learned from observation of the effect of this or that remedy on the sick person, of the effect in general of this or that natural product on the human being. But one lacks the inner vision of the connection, firstly, of the whole human nature, but secondly, of the connection between what is produced outside in nature, be it as food or as a remedy, and the human being itself. And only when one wishes to proceed from pure natural science to medicine in such an unprejudiced way does one realize what it means to exclude the human being from the point of view and then to apply what has been gained from such a point of view to human nature. Natural science excludes everything that can arise in human nature in order, as it says, to arrive at true objectivity. And it does achieve objectivity. But this objectivity does not include the human being. Man first excludes himself. It is no wonder that he does not include the human being in the science that he is now developing. Now this science is to be applied to the human being. It cannot be applied because no consideration has been given to the human being.

The complete opposite is the case with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Here, the whole human being is called upon to gain insights into the human being and the world. In this case, however, the insights are also based differently. In order to make myself clear on this point, I would also like to recall today how the spiritual science that is meant here is basically only one expression of what was established in the first element as a new knowledge of nature by the much-misunderstood natural scientist, not the poet Goethe. It is precisely for this reason that we call our building out on the hill in Dornach the Goetheanum, because we want to practise Goetheanism, but not the kind of Goetheanism practised by Goethe researchers who believe that the Goethean spirit came to an end in 1832 and that in order to practise Goethean science one has to study what this Goethean spirit has produced. No, we are pursuing a Goetheanism that does not go back to 1832, but which is a Goetheanism through the continuing influence of the Goethean spirit today from 1920. But what appears in Goethe in a very elementary way can today be grasped in a higher education by the course of human development.

Now I want to mention something seemingly quite remote, but by means of which I will be able to illustrate how one can reach the highest heights of spiritual science, starting from Goetheanism. Goethe proceeded from the similarities, the relationships, especially in the nature of living beings. It became clear to him how the whole plant is only a complicated leaf and a single plant leaf is an entire plant, only simply formed. Thus, Goethe saw in every part of an organism the metamorphosis, the transformed form of the other part. He sought to discover the origin of the enigmatic forms of the human skull bones, namely for the unbiased observer. As he himself recounts, he once went to the Jewish cemetery in Venice and found a sheep's skull that had split particularly well. The bones had fallen apart in such a way that their shape had a direct effect on Goethe's soul. And as he looked at this shape, he said to himself: Yes, these skull bones are nothing other than transformed, metamorphosed backbone bones. If the simple, almost ring-shaped vertebrae of the spine transform themselves – so Goethe believed – in such a way that certain extensions grow stronger and certain bulges flatten, then the skull bones arise from the transformed growth of the simple vertebrae of the spine. In this way, Goethe was able to express for the first time what, with a certain modification, is also a result of our present-day human anatomy: that the skull bones are transformed spinal cord vertebrae. In connection with this, because it will also explain the matter I am referring to, I may relate a kind of personal experience. These Goethean views have been particularly close to me since the late 1870s. Well, I already started writing about the Goethean scientific world view back then. This view of the transformation of the skull bones, the vertebral bones into skull bones, was also part of what I developed in more detail for the Goethean world view. But I said to myself, how could it have escaped such a universal mind as Goethe's that when one speaks of the transformation of the vertebral bones into skull bones, one must proceed to the view of the transformation of the simple nervous structure in the spinal cord into the complicated structure of the brain, so that one must also look at the brain as a transformation of the simple nervous structure that sits inside the spinal cord vertebra. And when I was appointed to Weimar at the end of the 1880s, to work at the Goethe and Schiller Archive on the new edition or the first edition of Goethe's unpublished writings, it was naturally a pleasant task for me to examine whether there might be something to be found somewhere, a clue that Goethe also had this view of the transformation of form of the brain from simple nerve ganglia. And lo and behold, when I got hold of a notebook with poorly written pencil strokes from the 1790s, I found Goethe had noted down this view of the human brain exactly as I had suspected!

I would like to point out another way of looking at things – admittedly, it is only just emerging in Goethe in an elementary form – a way of looking at things other than that which merely observes the laws of nature in an intellectual way. I would like to point out a way of looking at things that is instinctively within Goethe, which draws on the whole human being. In the kind of dissecting, analytical experimental method that is common in natural science today, one does not see such transformations correctly, because one must take everything into account, not just what one can measure and count. One must also take into account what one can only observe in terms of its intensity, its quality. In spiritual science, one must advance even further. There one must actually observe things according to the qualities that the spirit of the world, the soul of the world, impresses upon them, which are not found in the external scientific method.

Then one arrives at such results as the one that one might believe to be perhaps only an aperçu, but which is not an aperçu, but the result of spiritual scientific work, which I may say I have been working on for more than thirty years, that result which divides man into three, I would say, subdivisions of his nature. It is usually assumed that what is spiritual in man is soul-like and bound to his sensory nervous system. That is indeed today's one-sided view – the one who is familiar with the development of science understands that it had to come to this – that today man believes that the spiritual-soul life depends solely and exclusively on the nervous system. You can read what I have to say about this point from spiritual scientific investigations in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul), which was published two years ago. There I tried to show that only the intellectual-sensual life is connected to the sensory nervous system as its tool in human nature, that which observes objects sensually and processes them intellectually. In contrast, the human being's emotional life is directly, not only indirectly, connected to the rhythmic life in the human being, that rhythmic life which includes the respiratory system, the blood circulation system connected to it, and which is connected to the carrier of the intellectual system in a peculiar way, namely like this: we have the so-called cerebral fluid in us as the most important component of our brain. Our brain is, however, first and foremost a nervous organ that has to process what is conveyed by the senses. But this brain floats in brain water. And this brain water, which fills our main cavity, our spinal cord cavity, has a special task. When we exhale, the brain water sinks from top to bottom. The diaphragm rises, causing the brain water to sink; the opposite happens when we inhale. So we are in a continuous rhythm of brain water rising and falling.

This rhythm of the ascending and descending brain water is the outer carrier of the emotional life in man. And through the interaction of that which the brain nerves experience with that which arises as such a rhythm through the brain water, that which is the exchange between feelings and thoughts arises.

This is an area where anthroposophically oriented knowledge of the human being has a long way to go if the human being is to be properly understood in his soul-spiritual and physical being. Only when one has developed those methods of knowledge within oneself, which are characterized in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science”, in other of my writings, then one really learns to recognize, by having an inner soul life that is able to see through such things, how emotional life can be separated from intellectual life. Otherwise they mix. And the person with ordinary knowledge does not learn to recognize that the brain, that the nerve-sense apparatus, is only the carrier of the intellectual, while the rhythmic in the human being is the carrier of the life of feeling.

And in the same way, the metabolism is the carrier of the will, wherever it occurs; the metabolism in the brain is also the carrier of the will. But with the nervous-sensory activity, with the rhythmic activity, with the metabolic activity, the essence of the human being in relation to his functions is exhausted. That is the whole human being. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to grasp this whole human being through the powers of knowledge, again from the whole human being. Because it draws on everything that comes not only from the intellect, but also from the life of feeling and its carrier, the rhythmic activity of the human being, and because it also draws its insights from what lives and weaves spiritually in the human being's metabolism, it can grasp the whole human being. Only in this way does it actually learn to recognize what the lungs, liver, spleen and other organs mean in the human being; for this can only be recognized by taking the spiritual impregnation of things as a guide.

In this way, one acquires an intuitive knowledge of the human being, and one paves the way for an intuitive medicine. By looking at the human being as a mechanism, one does not learn to recognize him. You only learn to recognize the mechanical aspects of the human body. By taking hold of the human being in this way, by further expanding the Goethean approach, which is intuitive, and by further spiritualizing it, the individual organs of the human being in their metamorphoses become transparent. But then, when one has come to know what these individual metamorphoses of the human organism mean, one can place the human being, who one has now grasped, back into nature. If we first recognize nature in such a way that we exclude the human being, then we cannot place the human being back into nature. If we really get to know the human being as I have described him, we can also place him back into nature. We study his organology and we learn to recognize the deep relationship that exists between the human being and the cosmos. Then the connection between the food taken from the outer nature and the human organization becomes clear. But then the connection between the remedy taken from the outer nature or from the soul in the case of spiritual healing and the whole human nature also becomes clear.

I could only sketch out this view of the human being. But what I have sketched out is the way out of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science into an intuitive medicine, into the kind of medicine that, I would like to say, so many long for today, who have gone through the course of medical studies without prejudice and then feel released upon suffering humanity. They miss the intuitive, spiritual element in what has impressed them in human knowledge and the art of healing. It is precisely in medicine that it is most intensely apparent what a science can achieve when it excludes the human being from its methods.

Oh, I know that what I am saying is still facing a wall of prejudice in the present. But this wall of prejudice must be addressed again and again. It will take a long time before a larger number of people will attempt the path outlined here, because it is less convenient than the path taken today. Just as the whole plant is, in the Goethean sense, a complex leaf, so the whole human being is, in a sense, composed of three people: the thinking person, who perceives through the senses; the rhythmic person; and the metabolic person. Each represents a person in a certain way, and the three people must be built up to form the whole nature of the human being. And each link in the human being relates to external nature in a different way. But what that mysterious connection is between remedy and disease can only be grasped by the intuitive medicine characterized here.

I also know that many people today still feel that it is presumptuous of the spiritual science meant here to think, among many other things, of reforming medicine. It must think of it out of a sacred obligation to the progress of humanity. For he must realize that the path trodden by natural science in the last three or four centuries, which has been a blessing in so many fields, can never become a healing one for the treatment of the sick person. Just as the artist cannot be a true artist if he only knows the aesthetic laws intellectually, so the physician cannot be a healer if he only knows what are today called natural laws. He must be able to live with his whole being in the weaving and being of nature itself. He must be able to immerse himself in the creative and weaving nature. Then he will be able to follow with heartfelt interest the paths that nature takes when it is ill. Then, from the observation of the healthy person, the observation of the sick person will become clear to him.

Not only does spiritual science have something to contribute to hygiene, which it gains from spiritual forces, but spiritual science must also open up the prospect of an intuitive medicine. Anyone who engages with this spiritual science will hear how I have today only characterized in broad strokes and in general, in the abstract, a path to an intuitive medicine, but how much of what I have outlined here is already developed, how much is just waiting for the moment when the official representatives of medical knowledge come and acquire the insight that it must be taken up. This applies to physical illnesses of the body as well as to illnesses of the soul itself. Today, one must already appear immodest if one wants to point out what spiritual science believes it can contribute to the healing and nature of the human being on the basis of sound knowledge.

I would like to make the transition to what I will deal with tomorrow about the moral, religious and social nature of man by pointing out, in conclusion, how, precisely in such a field as that of a truly intuitive medicine, it would be the ideal of the spiritual scientist to be able to express himself before those who are truly experts. If they would come and allow their expertise to be spoken without prejudice, then they would see how this expertise could be enriched by spiritual science. Spiritual science does not fear the criticism of experts. Spiritual science is not amateurish dilettantism. Spiritual science attempts to create from deeper scientific foundations than those of ordinary outer science today. Spiritual science knows that lay opinion, not expertise, is what it might fear if it had not long since unlearned fear for easily understandable reasons. Spiritual science has no need to fear or be afraid of expertise or impartiality. It knows that the more expertly its results are considered, the more they will be taken up in a positive sense. Particularly with regard to the perspective of an intuitive medicine, one would like to recall an old saying, the universal value of which I do not wish to examine today, but which in a certain limited sense must certainly apply to the approach that willingly shows itself to be applied in the art of treating the sick person. The ancients said: Only the same can recognize the same. In order to heal the person, one must first recognize him. What science does today in the human being is not the whole human being, therefore not the human being, therefore not the human being. When the whole human being is called upon to recognize the human being, then the same - the human being - will be recognized by the same - the human being. And then an art of human knowledge and human treatment will arise that, on the one hand, will maintain human health in social coexistence as much as it can be maintained, and which, on the other hand, will treat illness as it can only be treated from the combination of all the real healing factors.

A view of the world, as it is intended to be in spiritual science, must prove itself by giving people support for what they need in life. The support for life must be what we can call moral strength. But the support for life must also include, among other things, what we can call the inner soul-condition that can arise in a person from feeling that he is a member of the great cosmic whole, from feeling so incorporated into the cosmic whole that it corresponds to what one can call one's religious need. As for man's inner moral strength, Schopenhauer spoke an excellent word, even if the further remarks he made on these words in his own way seem quite disputable. He said: It is easy to preach morals, but to found morals is difficult. This is indeed a true saying of life. For in general, to recognize what is good, what the moral life demands of us, is relatively easy as a matter of intellect. But to draw from the primal forces of the soul those impulses that are necessary in man to place himself in the fabric of life as a morally powerful being, that is difficult. But that is what it means to found morality. To found morality is not merely to say what is good, what is moral. To found morality is to bring to man such impulses, which, by absorbing them into his soul life, become a real strength, a real efficiency in him.

Now, at the present stage of civilization, man's moral consciousness is embedded in the world in a very unique way, in a way that is not always fully consciously observed, but which is the reason for many uncertainties and insecurities that prevail in people's lives. On the one hand, we have our intellectually oriented knowledge, our insight, which makes it possible for us to penetrate into natural phenomena, which makes it possible for us to absorb the whole world into our imagination to a certain extent, which makes it possible for us, in an admittedly very limited way, as we have seen in the last two reflections here, to also make ideas about the nature of man.

Alongside what flashes up in us as our cognitive faculty, as everything that is, I would say, directed by our human logic, alongside all this, another element of our being asserts itself, the one from which our moral duty, our moral love, in short, the impulses for moral action, arise. And it must be said that modern man lives, on the one hand, in his cognitive abilities and their results, and on the other hand, in his moral impulses. Both are soul contents. But for this modern man, there is basically little mediation between the two, so little mediation that, for example, Kant could say: There are two things that are most precious to him in the world: the starry heavens above him, the moral law within him. But precisely this Kantian way of thinking, which lies dormant in the modern human being, knows of no bridge between what leads to knowledge of the world on the one hand and what moral impulses are on the other. Kant regards the life of knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason and the moral life in his Critique of Practical Reason as if by chance.

And if we are completely honest with our sense of the times, we must actually say that there is an abyss here between two ways of experiencing human nature. Today's science, in forming ideas about the course of world evolution in the most diverse fields of knowledge, regards the workings of nature from the simplest living creatures, indeed from inorganic nature, right up to the human being. It forms ideas about how this world, which is directly before us, came into being. It also forms ideas about the processes by which the former end of this world, which is immediately before us, could take place. But now, from within man, who is nevertheless interwoven with this natural order, there wells up what he calls his moral ideals. And man perceives these moral ideals in such a way that he can only feel himself valuable if he follows these ideals, if there is agreement between him and these ideals. Man makes his value dependent on these moral ideals. But if we imagine that the forces of nature, which become accessible to man through his knowledge, are once upon a time approaching their end, where does today's sense of time leave what man creates out of his moral ideals, out of his moral impulses? Anyone who is honest, who does not shroud today's consciousness in nebulousness, must admit that, in the face of present-day scientific knowledge, these moral ideals are something by which man must guide himself in life, but by which nothing is created that could once triumph when the earth, together with man, comes to an end.

It is, for today's consciousness, one must only admit it, no bridge between the cognitive abilities that lead to natural knowledge and the abilities that govern us by being moral beings. Man is not aware of everything that goes on in the depths of his soul. Much remains unconscious. But what rumbles unconsciously down there asserts itself in life through disharmony, through mental or even physical illness. And anyone who just wants to see what is going on today without prejudice will have to say: our life is surging, and there are people in this life with all kinds of mental and physical contradictions. And that which surges up wells up from a depth in which something is indeed active that is like those weak human powers that cannot build a bridge between the moral life and the knowledge of nature. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science addresses these questions in the following way. It must abandon everything that is, on the one hand, only a theoretical view of external reality. It must therefore recognize everything that, as I explained in the last two lectures here, would like to exclude the human being from this view of nature, so that a true objectivity can arise.

What I characterized as the path to the spiritual world is presented, to summarize what I said earlier, in the following way: First of all, anyone who wants to enter the spiritual world must devote themselves to a certain inner soul-spiritual work. In my books, I have summarized this inner practice, this inner spiritual-soul work, as meditation and concentration work. This work enables people to relate to their imaginative life differently than they do in ordinary life when we observe natural phenomena or even social life. It is a complete being-with-the-ideas, which otherwise only accompany our outer impressions like shadows. Just as I said, we usually face people or nature or anything else in physical life with our feelings, with our sympathies and antipathies, and we face facts with our will emotions. How these ideas arise, that disturbs us, that challenges our sympathy and antipathy, that stimulates our entire life force. This becomes our destiny. While we are outwardly quite calm, inwardly we are going through something that is by no means weaker than what we otherwise go through as life's destiny in the outer world. We are, so to speak, doubling our lives. While we usually get excited, develop sympathy and antipathy, and assert volitional impulses only in the outer life, in relation to outer events, we carry what otherwise only occupies us in this outer material world into our inner life of thought. If we can do this — and everyone can do it if they practise as I have described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in my 'Occult Science' —, if we can really carry this out, then there comes a moment for us when in which he not only has images of the world when he opens his senses, when he hears or sees, but where he has images purely from the life of imagination, so full of content images, if I may use the expression, so full of sap, as they otherwise only come to us through sensory perception. They come through this thus intensified and sharpened life of imagination. Without sensory perception, we live in a world of images, as they otherwise only come to us through sensory perception.

But another significant experience is linked to this – these things can only be understood as experiences; abstract logic, so-called reasoning does not lead to them. Another experience is connected to this: We learn through such practice what it means to develop a spiritual-soul activity independently of the physical activity. The moment comes for the human being when he can rightly admit to himself, if I may put it this way, that he is a materialist, however strange and paradoxical that may sound. At this moment he can say: yes, in ordinary life we are completely dependent on the tools of our body. We think through the instrument of our nervous system. But that is precisely what characterizes this outer life, that we traverse it only by developing the soul and spiritual when it avails itself of the bodily instruments. But the soul and spiritual is not dependent on merely availing itself of the bodily instruments. Through the efforts described, it can free itself from the physical tool, can become free of the body. No matter how much speculation and philosophizing one does with materialism, if one only brings against it what can be known from ordinary life, one will never refute it, because for ordinary life, materialism is right. Materialism can only be refuted through spiritual practice, by detaching the soul-spiritual from the bodily in direct experience. One visualizes – I called it imaginative visualization in the books mentioned – one visualizes, but outside of the body, whereby the “outside” is of course not to be imagined spatially, but independently of the body. This is one side of what one must get to know within anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in order to really build the bridge that cannot be built in the way we have described. What one attains in this way as the content of imaginative knowledge is not in the human body, but outside of it. This provides the practical explanation that our innermost being was in the spiritual-soul world before it clothed itself with this body. For one is not only outside of the body, one is outside of time, in which one lives with the body. In this way, one really experiences the prenatal, or let us say, the pre-physical conception in man. Just as a light from outside shines into the room, so our prenatal life shines into our present life in this imagination.

What shines in is not just thoughts, it has a living content. This living content reveals itself as something very special. It reveals itself as a certain, I might say, intellectual content. So, as we cultivate, sharpen and strengthen our imaginative life in the way I have described, we come out of ourselves into a will content that has something living about it at the same time. It is the will content that creates in us what clothes itself in the physical body, what we do not have through heredity, what we do not have at all from the physical world.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not arrive at the realization of immortality through speculative processing of ordinary life, but rather through the cultivation of a cognitive faculty that is initially not present in ordinary life. What is particularly important for us today, however, is that in this way we reach beyond our physical body, even beyond the time in which our physical body lives. There one arrives at ideas that are still difficult for most people today to imagine, but which must become an important link in the evolution of humanity towards the future.

And now something very strange comes to light when one not only exercises on one side, that of the life of imagination, but also when one exercises on the side of the life of will. We human beings live, I would say, as Faust goes through life, saying, “I have only run through the world.” We run through the world. Of course, we undergo a development between birth and death, from month to month, from year to year, from decade to decade; but we undergo this development by, as it were, abandoning ourselves to external objectivity. Hand on heart, how many people do it differently than letting themselves be carried by life, be it by childhood, where adults educate them, or by later life and its fate? They become more perfect because the world makes them more perfect. But what do most people do differently, other than just abandon themselves to the stream of life? However, by abandoning oneself to the stream of life, one does not come to the spiritual path meant here. It is necessary that one takes self-discipline into one's own hands, that one actually works on oneself in such a way that one not only develops through the life that fate brings one, but that one develops further by making up one's mind: you want to implant this or that attitude. Now one works on implanting this attitude. One can undertake something on a small scale, one can do something on a large scale. But there is a big difference between just carrying out something in yourself, in the training of your own nature, by abandoning yourself to life, or taking this training of your own self into your own hands. By taking it into your own hands, you get to know the will in its effectiveness; because you learn to recognize what kind of resistance stands in the way of this will when you want to cultivate it in self-discipline. Oh, one gets to know all kinds of things in this way, one strengthens above all one's own powers of the spiritual-soul, and one will very soon notice when one exercises such exercises in self-discipline – but one must practice them for years – that one then acquires inner powers. These inner powers are of such a nature that we do not find them in outer nature. They are of such a nature that we do not find them in the ordinary life of the soul that we have carried within us before our exercises. We discover these forces only when we engage in such an inner exercise with ourselves. These forces are capable of something very definite: they are capable of absorbing into our own self, in a much more conscious way, the moral impulses that otherwise arise in the soul as if they were instinctive, as if they were indefinite and separate from the cognitive faculties. But understand me correctly, not into the self that we develop in our body, but into the self that we develop when we step out of our body with our imagination in the way described earlier. We cannot get the true form of the moral impulses into our sensual body, into our sensual perception; but we get what stands there so isolated that Kant presented it quite isolated as the categorical imperative, we get that into our self that has separated from the body.

And then what I have described earlier as imagination, as pictorial representations, becomes imbued with what one can call the objective power of moral impulses; it becomes imbued with moral inspiration. We now recognize that what wells up in us as moral imperatives, as moral ideals, is not rooted only in us, but in the whole of the world. We learn, by being outside of our physical being, to recognize that which does not appear in its true form within the physical organization, but in this true form, we recognize it through imaginative beholding, as objective forces of the world.

Such a vision can open up to a person who, with his or her healthy common sense, properly takes in what the spiritual researcher is able to say from his vision of the spiritual world. Anyone who imbues themselves with such a vision feels something very special about what today's popular public lectures are. It may sound strange when I say it, but I would like to say: anyone who unreservedly absorbs this inspiration in their imagination, which coincides with the moral forces that are present in human life, and imagines how can see through something like this in the present through spiritual knowledge, would like to think: if only such knowledge could take hold of people, at least as strongly as they are seized when they hear that X-rays or wireless telegraphy have been found! In view of what is taking place in the soul of a spiritual scientist, one would like to say: it is very necessary for present-day civilization that people should come to appreciate the spiritual forces for human strengthening that can be found in this way, just as much as what can be useful and beneficial in the outer life.

I believe that we have touched on an important challenge of civilization in the present day. The spiritual-scientific insights are, I repeat, not speculation, they are experiences. And the fact that so few people today accept them is because most people allow themselves to be blinded by materialistic scientific views, let their own prejudices stand in their way, do not apply their common sense, and therefore cannot properly

examine what the spiritual scientist says. They always say: we cannot see for ourselves what the spiritual researcher says. I would like to know how many people who believe in the Venus transits have ever seen a Venus transit! I would like to know how many people who say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen have ever observed in a laboratory how to determine that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen and so on. There is a logic of common sense. Through it one can check what the spiritual researcher says. I certainly cannot paint illusions before those who use their common sense, nor can I talk fantasies to them, because they can use their common sense to see whether I speak like a dreamer or whether I speak in logical contexts, whether I speak like someone who puts forward one idea after another, as one does even in the most exact science. Anyone who acquires such a healthy knowledge and understanding of human nature will be able to distinguish whether he has a fantasist in front of him or a person who, by knowing how to clothe his view in healthy logical forms and not giving the impression of a dreamer in other ways, is to be taken seriously. We have to decide many things in life in this way; why should we not decide in this way the most important thing: insight into the order of the world? There is no other way for someone who cannot become a spiritual researcher themselves – but everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, as I have explained in the books mentioned – to determine this; because spiritual science is something that is experienced, something that must be experienced, not something that is only achieved through logical conclusions.

So if you study worldviews, I would say the combination of imagination and inspired morality, you get to know something else, you learn to recognize what the contradiction is between so-called natural causality, natural necessity, and the element in which man lives as in his freedom. For it is only in the element of freedom that we can live with our moral impulses. We look out into the outer nature. Overwhelming for the view of nature that has developed over the last three to four centuries is what is called the necessary connection of the following with the preceding, what is called general causality. Thus, nature, including the human condition, presents itself as if everything were seized by a natural necessity. But then our freedom would be in a sorry state; then we could not act differently than the natural necessity in us compels us to act. Freedom would be an impossibility if the world were as the scientific view that has become popular in the last three to four centuries wants it to be.

But once we have gained the point of view that I have just described, the point of view of observation outside the human body, then everything that is permeated by necessity is, so to speak, presented as a kind of natural body. And this natural body produces a natural soul and a natural spirit in all possible places. The natural body is, as it were, that which has cast and thrown off the nascent world; the natural spirit, the natural soul, is that which grows into the future.

Just as, when I see a corpse before me, this corpse no longer has the possibility of following anything other than the necessities that have been determined by the soul and spirit that dwelled in it, so too that which is corpse-like in external nature has nothing in it of impulses as necessities. But in every place, what grows into the future springs forth. Our natural science has only been accustomed to observing the natural corpse, and therefore sees only necessity everywhere. Spiritual science must be added to this. It will see the life that is sprouting and has sprouted everywhere.

Thus man is placed, on the one hand, in the realm of natural causality and, on the other, in that which is also there but contains no causality. This contains something that is the same as the element of freedom we experience inwardly. We experience this element of freedom as I have described it in my Philosophy of Freedom when we rise to inwardly transparent, pure thinking, which is actually an outflow of our will activity. You can find more details in my Philosophy of Freedom.

Thus, what we gain by creating a possibility of knowledge for ourselves outside the human body carries us into a world where the contrast between natural necessity and freedom becomes explicable. We get to know freedom itself in the world. We learn to feel ourselves in a world in which freedom resides.

When I describe something like this to you, I do not do it just to show you the content of what I am describing, but I want to present it to you show you how man can enter into a certain frame of mind by absorbing knowledge drawn from such regions, by invigorating himself with such knowledge.

Just as we are imbued with joy when we experience an extraordinarily joyful event, as some people, when they have drunk so and so much Moselle wine, are completely imbued with the mood that comes from the Moselle wine, so too can a person's entire state of mind be seized by something so truly spiritual that it permeates the person. When has a person's state of mind been gripped by something, at first only in the outer life, but then in a shadowy way? When the categorical imperative or conscience moves in the face of moral obligations. But the content of this conscience now becomes clear and it will also take on a different emotional nuance. For what has actually happened – whether a person is a spiritual researcher himself, or whether he absorbs what the spiritual researcher brings through his common sense and incorporates it into his soul as insights – what has happened to the person? He has merged with something, has united with something, with which one only comes together when one goes out of oneself, when one alienates oneself from oneself. You will find no better, more realistic definition of love and the feeling of love than that which can be described as the state of mind that overcomes one when one penetrates, free of the body, into the entity of the outer world. If moral imperatives otherwise appear as a constraint, they can be cast in such a form that they appear imbued with the same mood that must permeate spiritual scientific knowledge. These moral impulses, these moral imperatives, can learn from the soul-attitude that comes to us through the assimilation of spiritual science; they can be warmed through by what must live in spiritual science in the highest sense: by love.

I tried to show this again in my Philosophy of Freedom, that love is the most dignified impulse for moral action in man. Within the modern development of the spirit, these things have already been spoken of more instinctively than can be the case today, when we can, if we want, have progressed in spiritual science. Kant once spoke of the compelling duty, of the, I would say, humanly restraining categorical imperative, which allows no interference of any sympathy. What one does out of moral duty, one does because one must. Kant therefore says: Duty, you exalted, great name, you carry nothing with you that means ingratiation or the like, but only the strictest submission. Schiller did not consider this slavish submission to duty to be humane. And he countered this Kantian argument with what he expressed so beautifully and so magnificently in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”.

But we need only take a small epigram that Schiller coined in opposition to this rigorist, rigid concept of duty as propounded by Kant, and we have an important humanistic contrast with regard to the moral life: “I gladly serve my friends,” says Schiller, “but unfortunately I do it reluctantly. And so it often rankles me that I am not virtuous.” He believes that in the Kantian sense, one should not gladly serve one's friends, but rather submit to one's duty in obedience. But that which can make human life truly human is when we fulfill what Goethe says in a few monumental words: Duty, where we love what we command ourselves. But the mood to love what one commands oneself can only be kindled from that state of the human soul that comes about in the acquisition of spiritual science.

So when one delves into spiritual science, it is not something that runs alongside life, like preaching morals, but there is a development of strength within it that directly takes hold of the moral will. It is a grounding of morality. It is there that which pours into the human being the moral love. Spiritual science does not merely preach morals; spiritual science, when taken in its full seriousness, in its full power, grounds morality, but by not giving words of morality, but giving strength for virtuous love, for loving virtue.

Spiritual science is not just theory, it is life. And when one acquires spiritual science, it is not just a matter of reflection, it is something like absorbing life, like breathing. This is what spiritual science can offer modern civilization in the moral sphere, what it must offer. For in ancient times, as I indicated the day before yesterday, people also had a spiritual science, but it was instinctive. Where did the spiritual science of the ancient, millennia-old developing Oriental wisdom come from? It was a dull, dream-like visualization of the world. It came from human instincts, from human drives. This spiritual science was instinctive. People saw into nature through a kind of clairvoyance. And this clairvoyance was connected with their blood, was connected with their outer physicality. But the moral impulses of that time were also connected with this blood, with this outer physicality. Both came from one source. Humanity is undergoing a development and believes that we can be like people thousands of years ago; this is the same as believing that an adult man can be like a child. We can no longer stand on the standpoint of the primitive clairvoyant arts of the ancient Orient or ancient Egypt. We have advanced to Galileism, to Copernicanism. We have advanced to the point of observation that arises in the intellect. In those ancient oriental ways of looking at things, the intellect had not yet developed. But for that, we must also get the impulses for our moral action from the spirit, not from instinct. That is the worst thing today, that people, when they talk about ideals or impulses for life, always make everything absolute. When some party member or enthusiastic theorist appears on the scene today, dreaming of a thousand-year Reich, they say: I want this or that for humanity and they think to themselves that what they are saying is good for humanity in all times to come and for the whole earth. That it is good in the most absolute sense. Anyone who really looks into the life of developing humanity knows that what is good, what is valid for the world view, is always only appropriate for a certain age, that one must know the nature of this age. I have often said in earlier lectures here: spiritual science, anthroposophically oriented, as I express it here, does not imagine that it is something absolute. But it does believe that it speaks from the heart of the present and the near future, that it says for human souls what these human souls need in the present and in the near future. But she knows full well that this spiritual science: if in five hundred years someone will again speak of the great riddles of the world and of the affairs of humanity, he will speak in different tones, in a different way, because there is nothing absolute in this sense, nothing that lasts forever.

We are effective in life precisely because we are able to grasp it in its liveliness, in its metamorphosis, even where we stand in it. It is easier to set up absolute ideals in abstractions than to first get to know one's age and then, from the essence of this age, to speak what is appropriate for it. Then, when, through the assimilation of spiritual-scientific impulses, man, as has been said, permeates himself with what comes to him from the spirit, then he will know that he is spirit as man, is soul, then he will know that he lives through the world as spirit and soul. And then he will address every other human being as spirit and soul. One would be inclined to say that something tremendous will come about when this becomes spiritual science in human life, when it becomes an attitude that permeates human life to such an extent that one consciously encounters another human being as a riddle to be solved, because with each person one looks into infinity, into spiritual depths and abysses.

What emerges from this real observation of our fellow human beings as spirit and soul will give rise to social and moral forces that must form the basis for a real treatment of the burning social question of our time. I cannot imagine that those who see through the whole essence of the social question and at the same time let today's human condition take effect on them do not suffer certain mental anguish. We live in a time when the social question needs to be resolved in a certain way. We also live in a time when the promoters of the social order are inspired by the most anti-social instincts, when the demand for social organization of life seems to be in opposition to what lives in human souls as anti-social instincts. No matter how beautiful the programs may be that are drawn up, no matter how beautiful the ideas that are entertained as to what should be done to solve the social problem, a way to solve it can only be found when the spirit is seen, felt and sensed among people, when people treat each other with respect, protection, honor and love, and not just the physical part of their fellow human beings.

That is why I have called in my book “The Essentials of the Social Question” for the separation of spiritual life from the rest of social life, so that this spiritual life can be placed only on its own foundations, independent of the state and independent of economic impulses, purely of human nature. Only such a free spiritual life will truly spread social instincts, social views and attitudes among people. Social morality also depends on people taking in their spiritual state what can become them in the pursuit of what can be said from the research of spiritual science.

And that in which man must rest as a whole, worthy and dignified, so that he does not feel as a mere lonely wanderer, but as a member of the world, the religious element, can, in the sense that modern man needs it, only be kindled and fanned by that which is attained as an inner mood in the pursuit of spiritual science.

The events of the world order or of human development that religious feelings point to stand there as fact. The Mystery of Golgotha, for example, stands there as fact. What took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era, when the Christ came into the flesh in Jesus, is a fact. One must distinguish this fact, this objective fact, from the way in which man approaches the understanding and contemplation of such a fact. In the times when Christianity first spread, it was able to flow within the human attitudes that still came from the ancient Orient. What happened in Palestine as the event of Golgotha was understood with the ideas that in a certain way came from ancient times, from primitive human attitudes. For centuries, those who were able to do so were honest and sincere in their understanding of the event of Golgotha through such ideas. But then came the time when Galilean science arose, when Giordano Bruno overcame space in such a remarkable way for the human conception by showing that what is up there the blue firmament is only that which lives in ourselves, the boundaries that we ourselves set, while in a far-flung sea of space the stars are in infinity. All that Copernicus brought, all that has been brought to the newer world-picture of externals by the spirits who have lived up to the present day, has come. In this time men have inwardly become accustomed to a different way of looking at the world than that through which Christianity was first comprehended. In this time a new relation must also be won to the religious foundations of the evolution of mankind. The point is not to shake the facts on which the religious development of humanity is based. But the point is to appeal to modern human conscience in such a way that the man of today, out of his state of soul, can understand the Christ event as he must.

Those who say that a new path must also be sought to the old facts on religious ground mean it most honestly and reverently with regard to religion. Spiritual science, oriented towards anthroposophy, will be the best preparation for understanding Christianity or other religious content in a modern way. Those who do not honestly mean it with religious life do not admit this, because they want to preserve ways to the foundations of religious life to which man today, when he otherwise pays homage to the views of his time, cannot pay homage.

We have come to materialism in modern times. Certainly, different types of people have become the instigators of materialism; but among these people there are also those who have retained certain old habits of life in the development of humanity, habits of life that have led to a monopoly being given to the denominations for everything that can be said about the spirit and soul. Because the confessions alone had the right to decide what should be believed about the spirit and soul, natural science was left without a spirit to guide its research. Today, natural science believes that it has taken on this form because it had to, when researching nature, one must exclude the spirit. Oh no, natural science has become so because in earlier times it was forbidden to research nature with spirit, because the church had to decide about spirit and soul. And today, people continue the habits and even trumpet them as unprejudiced scientific judgment.

One only has to look at such researchers, who in the sense of materialistic research must be highly praised, as for example at the Jesuit priest and ant researcher Wasmann, the excellent materialistic researcher in the field of natural science, a researcher who, however, does not allow a grain of spirit to flow into what dogma is. Spirit and soul must be excluded. Therefore: external science is materialistic. The founders of the religions of the book are not in the least the originators of modern materialism. However paradoxical it may sound today, it is true: because the church did not allow the spirit to be brought into the contemplation of nature, natural science has become spiritless. The others have only adopted this as a habit. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must bring the spirit back into the study of nature. Let me say once more: this spiritual science is not based on the idea that spirit only makes occasional or brief visits, as in materialism, so that man can convince himself that there is a spirit. No, this spiritual science wants to show that in the small and large, in all material things, there is always and everywhere spirit, that one can always and everywhere follow the spirit. But because spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy always and everywhere investigates spirit in the most material form, it shows that there is no such thing as a material substance that is independent of spirit, just as there is no ice that is independent of water. Ice is transformed water, water that has cooled down; matter is spirit that has solidified. One must only explain it in the right way in each individual case. By showing, as everywhere, where there is matter, where there is outer life, there is spirit, and by leading man to connect with the ruling spirit, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science also provides the impetus for a real religious deepening today.

But one experiences many things in this field. You see, an experience of a man who is even well-intentioned is the following. Someone says: I cannot examine spiritual science as Steiner presents it; it may contain truths, but it should be kept very far from all religious life, because religious life must represent a direct relationship, a direct unity of man with God, far from all knowledge. And now the person in question says, very strangely: in our time we have too much of religious interest, of religious experience; people just always want to experience something religious. They want to have religious interest. You don't need any of that in religion. In religion, you only need direct unity with God. Away, says the churchman in question, with all religious interest, with all religious experience.

Now, an unprejudiced person must say today that even if people still long for an unclear religious experience, even if they still awaken an unclear religious interest in themselves, that is precisely the beginning of the yearning to really find a way into the religious element, as I have described it to you now. Whoever is honest and sincere about religious life should take hold of that urge for religious interest and religious experience. Instead, the clergyman condemns religious experience and religious interest. The question today is whether real religious understanding is to be found in those who speak as they do or in those who try to speak as I have spoken to you today. However, you also have to recognize people by their fruits.

In a recent lecture, a man who is also a churchman, but also a university professor, tried to refute anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Two young friends of mine were in this lecture, and they were able to speak afterwards in the discussion. Because of the context, these two young people, who had absorbed the impulses of spiritual science well, brought forward words from the Bible to prove how what is written in the Bible, if properly understood, agrees with what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say in this area. And at one point the chairman, who was a real churchman, didn't know what else to do but say, “Here Christ errs!” It could be retorted, “So you believe in a God who errs!” A fine religious sentiment. It produces strange blossoms today. Religious sentiment is only genuine when it enters into real moral life. There one certainly has strange experiences. I now find it pretty much the most disgusting thing that can be said about what appears as a social consequence in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, from beginning to end, and that it has been lied about by a whole series of German newspapers. But people today find it compatible with morality to say that the following can happen as a moral consequence of religious practice. Recently, a canon, that is, a churchman of the Catholic kind, gave a lecture in a city about the spiritual science presented here, and at the end he said: find out from the opposing writings what kind of worldview the man represents, because you are not allowed to read his own writings and those of his followers. The Pope has forbidden Catholics to read them.

The recommendation to get to know something from the evil-intentioned, from the most malevolent opposing writings, is the moral consequence of some religious practices of the present day. No wonder that what we have experienced in the last five years has poured out over the world from such underground life. Or was it not a surfacing of lies and hatred of humanity and much more that was rooted and still is rooted in the depths of human souls? Should not the fact that one has experienced give cause to seriously consider whether a thorough re-education is not necessary? Has not something like world-historical immorality come to the surface of world history in the present? Or is it religious sentiment that has been acted out in the world in the last five years? Those attitudes that have not had centuries, but millennia, to work on improving humanity, are now seeing their fruits! Nineteenth-century theology no longer recognizes anything of the spirituality of the event of Golgotha. This spirituality, this divine Christ in the man Jesus, will be rediscovered through the path of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. From there, he will again enter into human souls, to prompt them not merely to preach morality, but to establish within themselves the right instinctive motivation for moral action and work in the world. Is there not an obvious need for renewal and reconstruction? Does this necessity not emerge when one looks at the events of the last five to six years? Do we not see the fruits of that which has been living under the surface for centuries and has now come to the surface? Should this not be proof that thorough religious and moral work is necessary?

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to collaborate on this work, the necessity of which any unbiased person must admit today if they are not asleep in their soul within the great events of the time. And anyone who wants to criticize it, who wants to condemn it, should first raise the fundamental question: does it honestly want to collaborate on the real progress of humanity? And only when he has conscientiously informed himself about it so that he can form an opinion about it, will it become clear to what extent this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has the right to participate. Because it wants to honestly and sincerely participate in the necessary progress, in the necessary rethinking and relearning of humanity.

Among the somewhat authoritative judgments that have been made in the present day about today's chaotic world situation, one of the most significant is undoubtedly that of the Englishman John Maynard Keynes, who, in his book The Economic Consequences of the Versailles Peace, offers such an assessment of the current general world situation. Keynes was undoubtedly led to such a judgment by his external circumstances. During the war, he was assigned to the English Treasury and was in a position to form a basis for such a judgment from the underlying facts that presented themselves to him there. On the other hand, he was among the envoys, among the collaborators of the Versailles Peace Treaty itself. However, he resigned from this position as early as June 1919. And this resignation, like the conclusions he reaches in his book on the economic consequences of the peace treaty, are precisely what sheds significant light on the way this personality relates to the current world situation. Keynes, too, was one of those who, when they first went to Versailles, probably still saw something of a prophet and organizer of the current world situation in the personality of Woodrow Wilson, who had come over from America and was received with such great glory. He has thoroughly changed his mind. And those of us who, even at a time when Woodrow Wilson was being declared a world liberator by an enormous crowd, including from this place here in Switzerland, has given his opinion that the empty and abstract arguments of Woodrow Wilson and his manifestos cannot contribute anything to the real reconstruction of the destroyed civilization, may well point to such an authoritative judgment today. In his book, Keynes describes, as far as personality is concerned, with an intense vividness — one might say. He describes how Woodrow Wilson arrives in Versailles, how he participates in the meetings, how slow his thinking is, how he, so to speak, always lags behind. While the others are already well ahead with their assessment of the situation, he is still far behind with something that was said five, six or ten sentences ago. He is a man who suffers from the slowness of his thinking. Much else is vividly described in relation to the personality of this alleged liberator of the world.

But Keynes also speaks about the other leading figures who were involved in this peace agreement, and speaks urgently. He describes how Clemenceau is a man who has actually slept through the whole development of European humanity since the 1770s, who actually wanted nothing more from this peace settlement than to reduce the world, in a sense, to what was available in Europe in the 1770s. And he then describes no less vividly and graphically how Lloyd George is actually superior to everyone else, how he has a certain instinct for sensing what is being thought and done and wanted by the personalities around him. And from all this one can see how difficult it is today, even for an astute observer like Keynes, to gradually arrive at a judgment through the force of the facts. That is what contributes more and more to the increasing chaos in the world today: that the leading personalities, the affairs that public life has brought to the surface in recent decades, are not at all up to the great demands of the present time. This is precisely what emerges from the book and its assessment. It shows that all the destructive forces at work in the world cannot be brought under any kind of judgment by those who have been called to leadership by public life. And since Keynes saw that nothing could come out of this conference that would lead to a healthy and prosperous further development of European civilization, he resigned from office right at the beginning of the negotiations. And the way he constructs his judgment is extraordinarily significant. In the present situation, one really only needs to construct something real on judgments that are based on such foundations. Keynes' judgment is, I would say, calculated. Only those personalities who have a certain sense and instinct for calculating the future with all sobriety from still existing forces in a certain way can really have a say in the present. They should be listened to with special attention, because the great majority of judgments made today are based on some kind of nationalistic or other prejudices, while only a few people are able to form objective judgments from the facts themselves. Keynes is one of them. He considers what might follow from what the three leading figures at Versailles have cooked up, especially in economic terms, and what would have to happen to the economic life of European civilization if nothing else occurred but the forces that were brought to bear at Versailles. And Keynes calculates – I say explicitly and I emphasize it very strongly – Keynes calculates that nothing other than the economic ruin of Europe can follow from this peace agreement. Of course, the intellectual and political ruin of Europe must be connected with the economic ruin.

Thus the book about the economic consequences of the Versailles Peace Treaty is interesting enough just because of its content. But in some respects it becomes even more interesting because of its conclusion. In this conclusion Keynes openly admits that he has no idea what should be done or wanted to get out of the chaos into which we are entering. And in making this confession, he says something that is actually extraordinarily significant, which he summarizes in a single sentence. He says that one can only hope that some salvation for European civilization will come from the combination of all the forces involved in a new state of mind and new imaginations.

My dear attendees, this is said by a man who has been immersed in the circumstances, who was called upon to participate, who, through his analysis, shows that he is a person who can calculate soberly in the broadest sense. A new state of mind, a gathering of all forces for a new view of the powers at work in the public life of humanity, where can these be found? How can we arrive at such a view?

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it will not take much impartiality to convince you that the first step in this direction is to examine the essentials of contemporary public life without any prejudice and to ask ourselves: What are the actual forces at work in contemporary public life? In earlier lectures, which I had the honor of giving here, I pointed out what kind of historical considerations should be used to arrive at the truly effective forces in human life. Above all, one must look for certain symptoms that vividly illustrate what is at work in the depths of human development. And so I would like to point out something that is perhaps one of the most outstanding forces that has worked with the forces of destruction. I would like to point out the basis of the world view of the present day, but in the way it has developed over the last three to four centuries. I do not wish to give the impression that a Weltanschhauung, founded in the solitude of a thinker, can now go out and influence every single soul, and that public affairs can, as it were, come into being out of such a Weltanschhauung. That is certainly not the case. But just as public affairs grow out of the will, out of feeling, out of the emotional life, out of the thoughts of the overall state of the human being, so too does the world view grow out of this overall state of human life, especially of the human soul. And one can see, as in a symptom, what the people of an age are like in their whole work and in their whole activity, when one, so to speak, considers the symptom of the world view, insofar as one wants to point to the world views that are decisive and have come into their own in the present. This determining factor is characterized, in particular, by the fact that everything that has not entered our world view through tradition from ancient times has developed out of the soil of natural science, which seeks to base its knowledge on external material observation alone. What does this natural scientific world view show, when looked at more deeply?

Perhaps only someone who can admire it can judge it correctly. And in earlier lectures, I have certainly expressed my admiration for the scientific world view strongly enough. These remarks, which I am developing here, are not meant to be a criticism of this scientific world view, which is certainly justified in its field. This scientific view, especially in its technical and economic consequences, has led to great fruits of civilization for humanity. But suppose there were some spirit today — it is hardly possible, firstly, given the vast field of scientific knowledge and, secondly, given its specialization — but suppose there were some spirit today that embraced the whole revolution of the scientific view from mathematics and from mechanics up to biology and up to what can be gained from biology for the science of the human soul: such a mind would undoubtedly be able to gain significant insights into certain areas of nature and being. But if such a mind were to ask itself with complete clarity the great and comprehensive human question: What is man in his own essence and in his whole relationship to the world? then the one who stands firmly on the ground of natural science, who is able to correctly assess the scope of scientific knowledge, would have to say: the scientific world view cannot answer these questions about the human being and about the relationship of the human being to the rest of the cosmos. This question remains unanswered, even by the latest physical scientific knowledge. There are already some great insights into how man has emerged in outward physical development from lower, animal-like forms to his present human form. But these insights have led man far away from what man is in his relationship to spiritual worlds. Those who cannot admit this to themselves without prejudice will also be unable to form an opinion about the inner impulses from which present-day humanity acts, whether it is organizing public affairs or destroying public organizations. For even if we are not always conscious of how we think consciously about the nature of man and his position in the world, even if we are not always conscious of the thoughts we entertain in this position, these thoughts, however unconsciously or instinctively they may be, they work in our feelings and in our decisions of will. They therefore become the creators of all public, spiritual, political and economic life. Anyone who wants to see things correctly will realize that economic interrelationships, since they are made by people, but since people in turn act out of their soul impulses, the economic interrelationships of the world are also a reflection of what people are able to feel about themselves and about their relationship to the world. Now we have to say: the scientific world view has grown large over all that is non-human. It cannot provide any answers about the human being itself. It is extensive when information is required about the sub-human realms. But how does the information that we, as human beings, acquire relate to what we should allow to flow into social life from our ideas and from our inner soul impulses, and in particular into the way we live together with other people and groups of people? Can we receive any impulses for human activity and human coexistence from those areas that lie outside of the human being? This is best shown by observing the relationship between the human being and language.

Language is basically the medium through which everything that leads from person to person comes to life. Through language, we also control economic life. Through language, we inaugurate external political and spiritual conditions. Now there is something most remarkable, which unfortunately is not often considered thoroughly enough. When we try to apply our language to scientific knowledge, we can never do anything other than extend the words, the phrases, and everything we use to express natural laws, those natural laws that we today so admire as the great progress of modern humanity, we can do nothing but extend to nature what we have formed in words as an expression of inner soul conditions or of conditions in man. Such subtle minds as Goethe's noticed this. That is why Goethe said: Man does not realize how anthropomorphic he is. -— When we say: an elastic ball pushes the other -, and we derive from it the laws of elastic' push in physics, then we basically start from what we have in the word meaning for the push that we carry out in our own organism. And anyone who really wants to investigate will see that everything that can be applied from language to natural science, which deals with the non-human, must be taken from the human being.

How did our language come to have content? It would have come to very little content if we could only imitate the mooing of a cow and other animal sounds. How did our language come to have such content? Those who can look impartially at the course of human development will find that all the content of language comes from the fact that, in times that were indeed behind our civilization, humanity had a certain instinctive-spiritual knowledge, I say: an instinctive-spiritual knowledge with the natural elementary empathy that arises in the human soul. With the impulses of the will, with pictorial imagination, which found expression in myth and mythology, spiritual insights came to man, and out of these spiritual insights he formed the content of the soul , which then became the content of his language in modern times, which is great in that it looked in a certain disdainful way at what instinctive spiritual abilities gave to man in an earlier time. In this modern time, in which one has become great primarily in relation to natural science, in this modern time our words have not been given any new content. And one thing is historically significant in the last two to four centuries: our language, all languages of our civilized world, have lost their old content. No new content could be poured into them because that which cannot provide such content, mere knowledge of nature, is that which has been developed in this very time. And in this time, which we must otherwise admire so much, there took place what may be called the emptying of civilized languages of their old spiritual content.

What did the civilized languages become as a result of losing their old instinctive content and natural science being unable to give them a new one? — They became that which has now reached a certain climax in the present day. They became that which developed into a phrase, and truly nothing that would only have a meaning in a limited area, but what is practiced today by those who exercise world domination is called a phrase. And the four to five years of horror that we have behind us have shown the world domination of the phrase at its peak. Today we live under the world domination of the phrase. What is the remedy for this world domination of the phrase? Only the acquisition of a new spiritual content, a conscious spiritual content. The old spiritual content, acquired by earlier humanity through instinct, which made language the sum of words, not phrases, is gone. Humanity that is truly attached to the present can no longer believe in it. A new conscious spiritual content must be conquered.

That, dear attendees, is what the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which has its representatives in the Dornach building, is consciously striving for: to conquer conscious spiritual knowledge in addition to scientific knowledge, which provides such great insights into everything gives such wonderful insights into everything outside of the human being, to conquer with the same clarity of thought, logical rigor, and scientific conscientiousness, spiritual knowledge that can now provide information about the great question of the nature of the human being and the human being's place in the rest of the cosmos. However, before one can proceed to such knowledge, one must admit that, although the external scientific method must be imitated in its conscientiousness today by all knowledge, it cannot itself lead to spiritual knowledge. In order to arrive at spiritual knowledge, it is necessary that the human being of today, above all, brings to bear those inner abilities that are to arise precisely on the soil of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here. I have shown how man can come to such knowledge through his own soul life, for example in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and in the second part of my 'Occult Science'. However, one thing is necessary - I have emphasized it here often enough - one thing is necessary for man, to which he now only surrenders with the greatest reluctance. It is necessary to have what I would call intellectual modesty. Modern man is so proud of his intellectual development. Intellectual modesty only asserts itself when, for example, one says to oneself: Suppose you give a five-year-old child a volume of Goethe's poetry. What will the child do with a volume of Goethe's lyric poems? It would probably tear it up or play with it. It certainly would not get from the volume of Goethe's lyric poems what an adult can get and what the volume of Goethe's lyric poetry is actually meant for. The abilities that can determine it, that can make it possible for him to let the volume of Goethean poetry take effect on him in the right way, must first be cultivated in the child bit by bit. For this development of childlike abilities, one surrenders a lot in human life today. But that a person, when he has grown up and is equipped only with the abilities that one can acquire in normal, external, sensual human life today, that he could then stand before the world itself as the five-year-old child stands before the volume of Goethe's lyrical poems, that he must first develop by taking his soul abilities into his own hands in order to extract from what what is presented to him in the world, something that can be compared to what the child first draws from the volume of Goethe's lyrical poems when he has grown up, in other words, what he does with the volume of Goethe's lyrical poems at the age of twenty-five – yes, to admit that, in his intellectual arrogance, the man of the present does not want to do that. But this must be asserted above all, that in order to truly know oneself, to finally fulfill the Apollonian saying “Know thyself,” it is necessary to take hold of the human soul faculties. How this is possible in detail will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture.

Today I would just like to emphasize in general terms that it is indeed possible for the human being to strengthen their thinking through a certain treatment of their thinking, which I will describe tomorrow. This enables their thinking to no longer passively , but that it is inwardly seized as by a will, becomes active, that it becomes more intense, that it occurs in such a way that the person knows through inner experience in direct perception: now thinking has become a spiritual-soul seeing. While in ordinary thinking one is dependent on one's thinking apparatus, on one's body, on the nervous system, and while, just when one develops thinking a little, one sees through this dependence, one also knows that when thinking is strengthened in the appropriate ways, which are described in the books mentioned, it becomes free from the body, it becomes an activity that is no longer guided by the instrument of the body. Certain meditations, to which one devotes oneself with the same objectivity with which one conducts an experiment in a chemical laboratory or observes the stars in an observatory, empower this thinking and free it from the tool of the body. It is only when this thinking is to be used for a real world-view that self-discipline of the will must be applied. When self-discipline of the will, together with inner meditation, develops into will-imbued thinking that is independent of the body, only then does spiritual knowledge arise, conscious spiritual knowledge, which in turn can give man what instinctive spiritual knowledge once gave him: content for speech, content for language. The moment man ceased to feel within himself the impulse to give content to his speech out of himself, the moment instinctive spiritual perception ceased and was replaced by external natural perception, which cannot give content to speech, the development of man in a certain respect came to a standstill. But man must recognize from the signs of the present that he must acquire self-knowledge and knowledge of humanity through conscious inner soul work, through the development of his thinking to soul-vision, and that only through this can arise what in turn gives content to our language, what can eliminate the world domination of the phrase.

But such knowledge also gives us the insight that the external world, as we observe it with our senses, is something we grow into in the course of our lives between birth and death, that these external observations cannot give us the actual spiritual, that this, the actual spiritual content, is brought into the world by us, that we bring it with us, in that we descend from spiritual worlds — as I said, we will talk about these things in more detail tomorrow — through birth into this physical world, that when we speak of the spiritual content, we must look at what people carry within, what they develop only through the instrument of their body, little by little, from year to year. It is not the ever-increasing wealth of the world's experience that brings the spirit into reality, but what we, as human individuals, bring into the world through our birth. Today people are only afraid of what man himself brings into the world. They are afraid because they believe that if he asserts it, it would lead to fantasy. But there are ways to avoid this fantasy. But anyone who realizes that, fundamentally, all spiritual content must come from human individuality will readily admit that a fruitful development of this spiritual life can only come about if the human being is given the full opportunity for human development, if he is not dependent in his spiritual development and in the expression and revelation of his spirit on any external powers that serve only here in the physical world. For with the rise of pure scientific knowledge, that knowledge which only provides information about what is non-human, there has also arisen, as organically connected with it, the dependence of spiritual life not on what the human being carries into the world through birth, but on what the external state life establishes, on what the economic life makes of the human being. At the same time as the natural sciences were coming of age, we saw the omnipotence of the state develop to the highest degree, with the state stretching its tentacles over everything that is intellectual life; it began to organize school life, and economic life, on the other hand, became decisive for the lives of those personalities who were able to enter precisely this intellectual field. But this has gone hand in hand with the fact that the human being has lost the ability to give birth out of himself a spiritual content, to give his words a spiritual content. Therefore, in the age of natural science, the dependence of spiritual life on political and economic powers has developed, and under this influence the world domination of phrase has developed.

This is the first link in the chain of present-day organizations that are working towards destruction: the world domination of phrase, of empty talk. If a person is incapable of investing words with the spiritual substance that he draws directly from his connection with the spiritual world, then words must become empty phrases; words must gradually become so ingrained in a person that he is, as it were, merely carried away by the mechanisms of language. And unfortunately we see this all too clearly emerging in modern times: that which breaks out with elemental force from the spiritual and soul inner being of the human being, which, as it were, only discharges into language, disappears. Life in the mechanisms of language becomes more and more intense, and it has reached its climax in recent years. Because people, by talking to each other about the civilized world, were talking directly or indirectly through the print of nothing, and by the words only taking place in their mechanism, that which was driven by chaotic forces to destruction developed.

I know very well that there is little inclination in the present day to go into these intimacies of human life when the causes of the present chaos are to be discussed. But no one will gain clear ideas and clear judgments about these causes if they do not want to go into these intimacies of the human soul. Not until this happens will harmony replace chaos in public affairs; not until spiritual deepening, through genuine spiritual science, gives rise in man to the urge to give his words full content. For that which certainly first appears in the scientific field, that which is born in the scientific field, it pushes its way into the other habits of life, it becomes the one that sets the tone in public life. And anyone who has an eye for observing life sees how, in the end, only the final consequences of what is ultimately present as the characteristic feature play out in everyday life, where worldviews are formed. Indeed, people have not wanted to properly survey the connections that arise there for a long time. Here in Switzerland, a blustering spirit once worked, I explicitly call him a blustering spirit so that you can see that I am not overestimating him, Johannes Scherr. He spoiled a lot with his blustering tone and his blustering judgment, which was also in the healthy thoughts that he had in what he said publicly. In the 1960s and 1970s, he made a very significant judgment based on a truly penetrating observation of historical and social life. He said: If the materialistic demon, which now only relies on that which man sees and experiences in the external world, continues to prevail, it will also enter into everything that man does in external public affairs; it will enter into economic and financial life, and a social structure will develop that will finally lead to the fact that one must say: Nonsense, you triumphed!

My dear audience! We don't like to listen to such people. This judgment of Johannes Scherr has also been ignored. But now, fifty years later, it must be said for those who look at everything connected with the so-called world catastrophe: the words of this world observer Johannes Scherr, which culminated in the sentence: You will have to say: Nonsense, you triumphed – the words have been fulfilled! For Johannes Scherr saw well how that which is spirit has gradually been squeezed out of human life, how the materialistic un-spirit has taken the place of the spirit, and he was able to turn this observation into a true prophecy. The world simply does not know that what is initially only a worldview, only a theory, that basically after two generations becomes moral, public action, becomes deed. Oh, the world should be much, much better at noticing certain connections! It should form a much more thorough judgment, a real judgment about certain things!

A philosopher, Avenarius, also worked here for a time. He is a kindred spirit of Mach, who in turn had a student work here in Zurich quite recently. These people have drawn the consequences in the field of world view from the current materialistic lack of spirit – I call it a lack of spirit because mere knowledge of nature cannot infuse our language with substantial content. They, the philosophers, Avenarius and so on, have drawn the consequences for their world view from the materialistic lack of spirit of the time. The philosophy they have gained, and the whole way in which people like Avenarius live, is good bourgeois. Of course no one will recognize in these people anything other than good citizens. But today something else should be recognized. Today, we should study the question based on the facts: What has become of the state philosophy of Lenin and Trotsky? What is the state philosophy of the Bolsheviks? It is the Avenarius-Mach school of thought! It is not just a matter of the temporal connection that a number of these people studied here in Zurich; it is the inner factual connection that what lives in the human soul as a world-view thought in one generation becomes action in the third generation. And in these deeds one can see the causes as they play out in the world. But today's humanity only wants abstract logical judgments and does not understand that something that is logically deduced is not yet a judgment of fact, that one must look with real spiritual insight into the real context, into the context of reality, and then seemingly most dissimilar, the bourgeois world view of Avenarius, which, however, emerged from a materialistic lack of spirit, is revived deep in that which fundamentally destroys all human society, which leads to the gravediggers of all European civilization.

At the same time, this indicates that this world domination of the phrase is not something that applies only to a narrow field. It is something that permeates our entire public life as a fundamental force, especially in the field of the spirit. And there will be no salvation until the spiritual life emancipates itself from that which has emerged as the basis for this phraseology, until the spiritual life emancipates itself from the external political or legal life, from the economic life, and to build only on what the spirit itself brings forth from itself, that is, what the individual human being produces from what he carries into the sensual world through birth from the spiritual world. To arrive at spiritual content is the only way to overcome the world domination of phrase. And there is something else closely associated with phrase. Because the phrase does not connect the context of the word with the content, the word very easily becomes a carrier of lies in the age of the phrase. And it is a straight path from the phrase to the lie. Hence the domination, the triumph of lies in the last four to five years, which in turn is so much a part of the process of destruction we are heading for if spirit is not called into the place of the un-spirit!

So much for the one area of public life, the area of intellectual life. But there are other areas as well. But all of them are dependent on the intellectual life to a certain extent. If the intellectual life is dominated by empty phrases and meaningless talk, then the feelings and perceptions cannot be given full expression. But that which develops in the feelings and perceptions in social life, that which is kindled in the interaction from person to person, as one person sympathizes with another, that is custom, that is what emerges from the social community into the realm of custom. And it is only from this customary practice that law can develop historically. But this law can only develop if the sentiments that arise in the interaction between people do not become imbued with empty phrases, if these sentiments are linked to words that are full of substance and to speech that is supported by thought. And in the age of empty phrases, the feeling between human beings cannot be kindled in the appropriate way either; only an external relationship between human beings can arise. The consequence is that in the age in which empty phrases develop in the field of social intellectual life, conventions develop in the field of social feeling instead of the direct substantial relationship between human beings. of man to man, which can at most be regulated by external treaties, that even between nations one raves about treaties because one does not come to the elementary living out of that which can be revealed from person to person. This age of convention makes a second area of our public life so empty of content: it deserts human coexistence, as the phrase deserts the spiritual life, the life of the soul.

This is what leads to the mere external man, not to the right born from within the man. For this right can only be ignited when the word borne by thought flows from the head to the heart. Just as real right, which can flourish in social life alone, belongs to the real spiritual life, which is filled with substantial spirit, so convention belongs to the spiritual life that lives in phrase. Thus we have characterized two areas of our public life in the present.

The third area from which public life emerges is human volition. A conscious will, a will that places a person in human society in such a way that this person brings something into society that flows from his or her own human nature, cannot come about unless it is driven by real, substantial, spiritual content. The phrase is unsuitable for evoking a real conscious will. Just as spiritual life becomes a mere phrase when it becomes dependent on the external life of the state or of the law, or on the external life of economics; just as the life of the law itself is absorbed in convention when it can only be nourished by empty phrases, so the sphere of economic life, the sphere of external human coexistence, is supported, not by the practice of real life but by mere routine, when the will is not inspired by the spirit. Therefore, alongside convention and empty phrases, we see the emergence in the age from which our present age has developed, in the sphere of life and in the outward expression of life, in the sphere of economic life, of routine everywhere.

What is meant by this: our economic life is dominated by routine – it may become clear from this if I say: a realistic consideration of our public life has shown that in the field of economic life, that chaos must end, which is prevalent in the present, where everyone only wants to acquire out of their own selfishness and no one is aware of the context in which their own production is placed in relation to the production of the whole. Only when we realize that this economic life, which has gradually descended into chaos, can only be healed by associating the most diverse professional and life spheres with one another, by people who belong together in different occupations really integrating with one another, so that associations arise from occupation to occupation, that associations arise between the consumers of a profession and the producers of the profession, in short, that our economic life acquires a structure so that the producers, by organizing themselves internally, join forces with their consumers, so that the individual who is a consumer or producer in a profession can see how his consumption and production into some economic cycle - only when the person lives in such an organization, when our economic life is based on association, only then does the individual see how he contributes to the economic process through what he produces or how he participates through what he consumes. Then the individual human being not only knows how to handle this or that in some routine of life, but he also knows that what he does belongs to the overall process of the economic life of humanity. Then he acts out of other impulses. Then what he does is not dominated by a superficial routine, but by a life practice that is only possible if one can connect an idea to it, if one places oneself economically within the overall organism of humanity. Because life has become dominated by empty phrases and because human interaction has become dominated by convention, people have not found the opportunity to associate with each other in this way. They have been turned away from the tasks they face and have become mere routine workers. And routine spread from the individual mechanical action to the mechanism of our entire organization and our entire financial system. The phrase-filled time became the time of the routiniers. And the routiniers brought about that catastrophe, which shows this or that on the surface, but which in its depths shows the causes that lie in the area that has just been characterized.

If we examine the things that dominate contemporary life with an open mind, without sympathy or antipathy, we have to say: in the field of intellectual life, empty phrases; in the field of legal life, conventions; and in the field of economic life, routine. Only the forces that I will describe tomorrow can lead to salvation. This is when the phrase is replaced by speech that is filled with a substantial spirit, with a spirit that has been contemplated, and that can only come about in an independent spiritual life that brings forth what man has to bring into the outer life, which does not want to dominate this spiritual life like the laws of nature, which are gained through outer experience. The conventions of what is externally established must give way to the living interplay that can arise when, on a strictly democratic basis, all mature human beings enter into that which is generally human affairs, which the human being does not bring in through his birth, but which can only develop in the human coexistence of mature human beings. Only when man arrives at such a world-view from the phrase-free, thought-filled word, can the true practice of life develop out of the routine that clings to ephemeral economic objects. that testify and reveal that what is achieved on the ground of economic life is more than what is accomplished by the machine, that it is a link in the overall process of human development on earth. We will not stop at this if we stand as a routine worker at our machine, in our factory, in our bank or anywhere else; we will only stop if the threads of association go from one person to the next, if one person learns from another how he or she is connected to the social organization closest to him or her through his or her consumption and production. What these people achieve together through their combined efforts and associations will be something more than what the human being can achieve in economic life. Man must work, but through his economic activity his whole human being rises out of the transitory and into the eternal. And he will experience from his economic life that precisely by becoming a practitioner in this life, he has a school of practice, the results of which he can carry even through death.

Thus it follows from an observation of the present life, which is more directed towards the spirit, from the three most characteristic domains, that of phrase, that of convention, that of routine, the necessity to work according to a threefold structure of social life, according to a recovery of our spiritual life through its independence, through a recovery of our legal life, which can only be freed from convention when living democratic interaction occurs between all mature human beings, and through a recovery of economic life in which the independence of economic life abolishes routine in favor of a real life practice. But this can only happen when people associate with each other, because it is only through this social interaction that something arises out of what the individual can produce, something that leads all of humanity beyond itself, from mere matter to spirit. Phrase means unspiritualness in the realm of spiritual life; convention means unspiritualness in the realm of the state and of the law; routine means unspiritualness in the realm of economic life. In place of unspiritualness, spirit must come. How it can, and with what forces it can, is what I will attempt to describe tomorrow. For only when, in place of empty phrases, there is again speech that is borne by thought, and only through this, when in place of convention there is the legal life that is imbued with human social feeling, and only through this, when in place of economic routine there is spiritualized economy , an economy ordered by the spirit and steeped in associations, only in this way will our entire public life be healed from what ails it in the present, one must say: what would destroy it if no healing process were to occur.

In the present, unfortunately, we only notice too much the phrase, the convention, the routine. We see the result: chaos. For the future we need the thought-borne word, the spirit filled with substance, the living law that results from the interaction of all mature human beings. That is spirit instead of un-spirit at this point. In the field of economic life we need the associations that arise from the spirit, we need the replacement of routine with the true, spirit-filled economy. In the economic field this means replacing the unspiritual spirit of the present with the spirit of the future. And only by doing so can we rise from pessimistic moods, which are all too justified today when we look at the world around us, to a certain hope for the future. We do not build on what could be thrown at us somewhere today as hope for the future, but that we build on our own human will, which wants to stake its power, its endurance, its fire, out of the present for the future, the victory of the spirit over the un-spirit.

[There follows a brief discussion).

Closing remarks

The first speaker in the discussion initially concluded his remarks by pointing out that an international language serves as a unifying element in humanity. I do not want to go into the pros and cons that can be asserted against such an international language, because this can only be decided through extensive discussion. But I will assume that those who strive to establish such an international language have a certain right. We know what has been tried and done in this direction. Well, it is not enough with the associative way in which such a language has been pursued so far, because such a language would still have to find completely different ways to people than it has found so far if it is to have a truly practical significance. But I do not want to speak out against such a language. Because, you see, on the one hand I know that what arises artificially in our time also bears the characteristic properties of all that our time can produce: a certain intellectualism, a certain intellectualism. And I cannot help but confess that it seems to me that precisely that which has brought us down today, intellectualism, the anti-elemental, was also essentially active in the construction of today's attempted international language. I can very well appreciate the view of those who say: what will ultimately become of that originality of human self-revelation in poetry, in speech, which is truly connected with the innermost being of man, if we pour an abstract language over all mankind? On the other hand, I have also heard some truly wonderful poems in Esperanto, and I must say that I have already tried to achieve a certain objectivity in this matter.

However, what I have presented today, ladies and gentlemen, is not at all affected by the question of such a language. Because, hypothetically speaking, if such a language were to be poured out on humanity, it would be unable to contain anything other than empty phrases if we did not come to a new revival of the substantial spirit. Whether we ultimately turn phrases in Esperanto or in English or in German or French or in Russian is irrelevant. What matters is that we find a way to bring substantial spirit into Russian, German, English, French and Esperanto. And that is one of the questions I have addressed today.

So, as I said, I do not want to say anything against the efforts of those who go for such an abstract language. I believe that perhaps the one point of view could be not entirely unfruitful if it were possible to have an international language for that which really lives in international economic life, for example, that then perhaps the possibility would be given for the actual spiritual life, which after all must always must always arise from individuality, to liberate the other languages. This can only happen if they can develop individually, just as the spirit must develop individually, if their development is not to be disturbed by the lust for conquest and domination on the part of political powers. I believe, however, that the hopes of the Esperantists and similar people are still on much weaker ground than the hopes of those who believe that if only a sufficiently large number of people can come together today to work towards a renewal of our intellectual life from the real spirit, then a better time could dawn, even if it is not perfect. Those who see reality as it is cannot belong to the group that hopes for an earthly paradise. I believe that the latter type of person is still more in touch with reality than those who hope for an international language.

What was said by the second speaker was essentially an interpretation of what I said in part of my lecture, and I would just like to note that when discussing such talking about such things, that it is necessary not to regard human beings as if one could simply approach them and make them better by teaching them. In public life I have often used the image for the pure teaching method: If I have a stove in front of me, then I can say: it is your stove duty to warm the room, it is your categorical imperative to warm the room. I can now preach on and on, with all Kant's insight I can preach on and on, it will not get warm. If I remain silent and just put wood in the stove and light it, the stove will warm the room without any preaching. It is the same with people. If the whole human being is in question, if not only that is in question which can, for example, provide a theoretical echo in the human being, if the whole human being is in question, preaching is of little use, because then one is dealing above all with the human being standing within a social totality. And the human being in a social totality is something different from the individual, unique human being. If we demand of the individual human being that he should somehow contribute to the betterment of humanity through a concentrated life of thought, then it must first be possible for such a concentrated life of thought to develop in a fruitful way. Ultimately, this is only possible in a free spiritual life. Further explanations can be found in the “Key Points of the Social Question”. The question today is not so much to examine what is good for the individual, but what must be brought about in the human social organism so that the individual can truly develop.

In 1894, during the nineties, I published for the first time my “Philosophy of Freedom”. In it, as a consequence of a spiritual world view, there is also a certain ethic that is built precisely on the individual human being. But there is a prerequisite, and this prerequisite must be made by everyone who grasps the problem of freedom in a serious and realistic sense: that, if it is possible to have intuitions that establish human freedom, then it must also be possible for that individual human being to bring forth something that can be built upon in social coexistence. But our attention must constantly be directed to this social life. Therefore I may say that in a certain sense my Philosophy of Freedom is supplemented by my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage (Key Points in the Social Question). Just as my Philosophy of Freedom investigates the source of the forces that lead to freedom in the individual human being, so my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage investigates how the social organism must be constructed so that the individual human being can develop freely. And these are basically the two great questions that must occupy us in contemporary public life. A real answer to this question will at the same time be able to shed some light into the chaos.

I would like to note that I have organized today's and tomorrow's lectures in such a way that today's lecture should, so to speak, be more of a critique of the times, pointing out what has been in the present so far, that this present has become what we see it as, drifting into chaos, equipped with tremendous destructive powers. Tomorrow I would like to explain what needs to be done to enable national life in the broadest sense and the life of civilized humanity in general to emerge from the chaos. I would like to show how the forces that already lie within man, and that lie particularly in human coexistence, can be unleashed, but how they are fettered today. Therefore, the positive, to which the last speaker obviously wanted to point, will be more in my tomorrow's lecture than in my today's. But it had to be pointed out, what we are suffering from, so that a knowledge of the will can be built on this knowledge of the present, which is necessary for a prosperous development in the future.

But I would like to mention one more thing in conclusion. Those who are serious about the great issues of the present must not think in a traditional sense, they must not be followers of something similar to a “thousand-year Reich” or the like, they must not think that we can establish a paradise on earth here, but they must think that every reality can only develop in accordance with its own conditions of existence, that within the life between birth and death one can only come to a 'yes' in this life if one is able to constantly supplement the imperfections of physical life with the prospect of a spiritual life: One of the greatest mistakes of our time is that a large number of people gradually want everything that makes life worth living to come from the mere external life. And this is how social questions are formulated today: How must the external life be designed to give people everything they imagine a paradise would offer? Those who ask the question in this way will never come to an answer. You can only come to a true, genuine answer if you are imbued with a sense of reality. And I will take the liberty of speaking tomorrow about what such a sense of reality can give as an answer to the great question of the present.