The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Question: For many years I have suffered from hayfever. Now I have heard that it must be treated early in the year. If injections are administered as early as January or February before a person begins to suffer, they are supposed to be more effective. Should I go along with this remedy?

Dr. Steiner: What you have said is correct, but there is one small catch. You see, the remedy that is in use here is meant to be applied prophylactically; that is, it is meant to work ahead of time. In fact, it should be used weeks before the symptoms of hayfever arise. The problem, however, is that patients come in only when they are already afflicted with the malady. Just today we received an interesting letter about another hayfever remedy. The inventor of this other remedy writes that his medication brings only a little relief to individual hayfever attacks. He believes that our remedy can permanently cure hayfever, especially if it is taken twice at wide intervals. Naturally, we would much prefer patients to be treated in January or February rather than in May or June. Understandably, however, people generally see a doctor only after an illness has been contracted.

Yet, our hayfever remedy works in such a way that if given to the patient even during the external appearance of the illness, which is only the final result of an inner affliction, it protects him from a renewed attack. It is particularly effective if applied again a year later. After that, the application need not always be repeated. Even though the illness affects only one organ, this remedy treats its basis in the whole bodily organization. To explain this, I would like to go into more detail concerning the causes of internal illnesses and how they arise in the first place.

Of course, it is quite simple to comprehend why one becomes indisposed if one breaks a leg or sustains a concussion due to a fall. In these cases the injury is external and the cause easily understood; the cause is externally visible. In the case of internal illnesses, however, one usually does not really consider where they come from and how they suddenly assert themselves. This pertains to another question raised earlier of why one may become infected when in contact with certain people. An external cause also seems to be present here.

Ordinary science offers a simple explanation for this. Bacilli are transmitted from an ill person who has influenza, for example, and then these are inhaled and bring about the disease in another. It is like someone injuring a man by hitting him with a mattock. In this case the injury is caused by a patient bombarding another person with a multitude of bacilli. Matters are not at all that simple, however; they are much more complicated. You will understand this when you realize that in everyday life a man constantly becomes a bit indisposed and then must cure himself. The point is that all of us are really a bit sick when thirsty or hungry, and we cure ourselves by drinking and eating. Hunger is the beginning of an illness, and if it is allowed to continue we can die from it. After all, we can die of starvation and even sooner of thirst. So you see that even in our everyday lives we bear something like the beginning of a disease. Every act of drinking or eating is in truth an act of healing.

We must make clear to ourselves now what in fact happens when we become hungry or thirsty. You see, our body is inwardly always active. Through the intake of food, the body receives nutrients. External substances are absorbed through the mouth and the intestinal passages into some part of the body. Now, you must understand that the human organization immediately rebels against these nutritional substances; it does not tolerate them in their original forms and destroys them. Food substances must actually be disintegrated. In fact, they are annihilated, and this begins in the mouth. The reason for this is that there is continuous, never-ceasing activity in our body. This activity must be observed in the same way as fingers or hands are. Ordinary science simply records how a piece of bread is eaten, dissolved in the mouth, and then distributed in the body, but we must also take into consideration that the human body is continually active. Even if nothing is put into it, if nothing goes into the body for five hours, say, still its activity does not cease. You may even be like an empty sack, but things have not quieted within. You remain in constant inward activity, and things are still bustling around. Only when this internal activity can become occupied with something is it content. That is especially the case after a meal when it can dissolve and disintegrate the food substances; then it is content.

This internal activity that we possess is quite different from man in general, for the human being can become lazy. The internal activity is never lazy, it never ceases. If I don't eat anything, it is as if I had an empty flour sack in which there is activity even if I avoid all tangible substance. This activity—for reasons that I shall tell you later on—is identified in spiritual science as the astral body. It is never lazy, and if it can stay active destroying and dissolving the food substances, it is filled with inward comfort; it then has a feeling of inner well-being. But if I take in no food substances, then the astral body is not satisfied, and this dissatisfaction is expressed as hunger. Hunger is not something at rest within us; it is an activity, a soul-spiritual activity that cannot be stilled. We can truly say that this inner activity is in love with the food substances, and if it does not receive them it is just as dissatisfied as any jilted lover. This dissatisfaction is the hunger, and it is by all means something spiritual.

So the activity that is executed internally consists of disintegrating food substances. What is useful is transmitted into the blood vessels, and the rest is eliminated through urine or feces. This is the healthy, normal and regular activity of the human being in which the astral body works properly to dissolve the food substances. It absorbs into the body what is useful and discharges what is not.

We must assume, gentlemen, that this activity of man is no ordinary activity; rather, it contains something immensely wise. Now, dissolved and transformed food substances are constantly being transmitted through blood vessels to the inner organs, and the nourishment that goes into the lungs is completely different from what goes to the spleen. The astral body is much smarter than the human being. Man can only stuff the provisions into his mouth, but the astral body can distinguish them. It is like sorting two substances, throwing one in one direction to be used there and the other in another direction. This is what the astral body accomplishes. It selects certain substances to dispatch to the lungs, spleen, larynx and other organs. A wise distribution is at work within. The astral body is immensely wise, much wiser than we. The most educated person today would not know how to send the proper substances into the lungs, larynx or spleen; he would not even know what to say about it. But internally man can do this through his astral body.

The astral body, however, can become stupid—not as stupid as the human being can become, but stupid in comparison to its own cleverness. Let us assume that it thus becomes stupid. Man is born with a certain predisposition and is inwardly endowed with certain forces. The activity that the astral body develops for food substances occurs even if somebody sits down all day, immobile like an Oriental idol. His astral body still remains active, but that is not enough. We must also do something externally, and if we have no work to do we must go for a stroll; the astral body demands that we at least walk around. This differs with each individual. One person needs more physical activity, another less.

Let us suppose now that someone has certain predispositions from birth that make him into a sedentary person. It pleases his stupid head—or we could say his stupid ego—to sit around a lot. Now, if he is predisposed to sit around, but the astral body is predisposed to walk about, then his astral body will become stupid. This will also happen if somebody overexerts himself walking. In both cases the astral body will become stupid and will no longer accomplish things correctly. It will no longer properly sort out the food substances and transmit them to the appropriate organs; it will do all this clumsily instead. The astral body becomes too disorganized to send the right substances to the heart or larynx. Substances improperly transmitted to the heart, for example, will remain somewhere else in the body. They are not put in the organ where they belong but, since they are basically useful, neither are they eliminated with the feces. Instead, they are deposited somewhere else in the body. But a man cannot tolerate having something deposited in his body that is not part of its proper activity; he cannot stand that.

So what happens with these improper deposits due to the malfunctioning astral body? What happens to us on account of that? Well, suppose we have in our body certain deposits that should have been directed to the larynx. Because someone's astral body does not function properly, “larynx refuse” is secreted everywhere in his body. The first thing that happens is that his larynx becomes weak. The organ does not receive sufficient sustenance, and thus the person suffers from a weakened larynx. But apart from that, his body contains larynx refuse, which is dispersed everywhere. As I have already told you, the human body is ninety percent water, and the refuse dissolves in this whole fluid organization. The pure, animated fluid that a man requires within him is now polluted. This is what happens so often within ourselves. Deposits meant for certain parts of the body dissolve in our fluid organization, contaminating it.

Say that the refuse of the larynx is dissolved in us and comes into contact with the stomach. It cannot cause damage there, because the stomach has what it needs and was not deprived of anything. But the bodily fluids flow everywhere in the human organism and penetrate into the area of the larynx, which is already weakened. It receives this polluted fluid, this water in which the larynx refuse is dissolved, and specifically from this the organ becomes diseased. The larynx refuse does not affect the other organs, but it does cause the larynx to become afflicted.

Let us now consider a simple phenomenon. A sensitive person finds it pleasant to listen to another person speak beautifully. But if someone crows like a rooster or grunts like a pig, he will not find this so pleasant to hear, even if he understands what is being said. It is not at all pleasant to listen to a person crowing or grunting. Listening to someone who is hoarse is a particularly uncomfortable and constricting experience. Why do we experience such sensations while listening to another? It is based on the fact that in reality we always inaudibly repeat whatever the other is saying. Listening consists not only in hearing but also in speaking faintly. We not only hear what another says but also imitate it with our speech organs. We always imitate everything that someone else does.

Now imagine that you are near a person who is sick with flu, and though you may not be listening to him and inwardly imitating his speech, you feel sorry for him. This makes you quite susceptible and sensitive to him. The flu patient's fluid organization contains many dissolved substances, which contaminate the pure, living fluid I told you about and make it instead unhealthy for him. I even describe the nature of such a contaminated fluid organization.

Imagine that you have a piece of ground where you plant various things. Not everything thrives in every kind of earth, but suppose you want to plant onions and garlic in this particular spot. Should the earth be unsuitable, the onions would be small and the garlic buds still smaller, so you should also add to this soil something that contains sulphur and phosphorus. Then you would have the healthiest onions and garlic buds, and they would smell strong, too!

Now, when a man has influenza refuse within his body, the same substances are dissolved in his fluid organization that had to be added to the ground in order to produce the finest onion and garlic plants, and before long, the sick person begins to smell like these plants. Now, I associate with this, though I may not even be aware that I am sitting in this odour of onion or garlic, because it need not be strong. The odour exuded by a person who is sick with the flu causes the patient's head to feel dull, because a certain organ in the head, the “sensorium,” is not properly supplied with the substance it needs. As a result of having flu refuse within us, an organ in the mid-section of the head is not properly supplied. This odour is always like that of onions or garlic and can be detected by one with a sensitive nose. Just as we tune in on and imitate a shrill and rasping voice, so do we join in with what an ill person evaporates. As a consequence, our own astral body, our own activity, becomes disorganized. This disorder causes a chemical basis that in turn makes us contract the flu. It is like making soil suitable for onions and garlic. At first, then, the illness has nothing to do with bacteria but simply with the relation of one person to another.

If you want to plant predominantly onions and garlic in a garden, and you add to the earth substances containing phosphorus and sulphur, you can now wait and say, “Well, I've done my duty. I want to harvest onions and garlic, and so with some kind of organic fertilizer I have added sulphur and phosphorus to the garden.” But it would be foolish to think that this is all it would take to grow the onions. You would first have to plant the bulbs! Likewise, it would be foolish to maintain that in man's interior, bacteria are already growing in the environment that is being prepared.

They first have to be introduced into it. Just as the onion bulb thrives in soil rich in phosphorus and sulphur, so do the bacilli thrive within a sulphuric environment in the body. Bacilli are not even necessary for one person to catch the flu from another. Instead, by imitating with my fluid organization what is happening in the patient's fluid organism, I myself produce a favourable environment for the bacilli; I myself acquire them. The sick person need not bombard me with them at all.

When we look at the whole matter, we must reply in quite a specific way to the question, “What is it that causes us to be stricken with a certain disease?” We become sick when something injures us, and even in the case of internal illnesses something is actually injuring us. The impure fluid, in which substances are dissolved that should have been digested, injures us; it injures us internally.

Now we can turn our attention to illnesses like hayfever. The incidence of hayfever depends much more on the time of year than on the pollen in the air. More than anything else, what makes a man susceptible to catching hayfever is the fact that his astral body is not properly excreting; it is not properly executing its activity that is directed more to the external surface. As a result, when spring approaches and everything begins to thrive in water, a person makes his whole fluid organization more sensitive and thus susceptible to this illness by dissolving certain substances in it. By dissolving various substances in this fluid organization, the fluids in a man's body always become a little diluted. The fluid organization in a man who has a tendency toward hayfever is always somewhat too large. The fluids are being pushed aside in all directions by what is dissolved in them. That is how a person becomes sensitive to everything that makes its appearance in spring, especially to pollen, those particles from plants that are now particularly irritating.

If the nose were not enclosed, hayfever could be induced by many other irritants. Pollen does enter the nose, however, and it cannot be well tolerated if one already has hayfever. Pollen does not cause hayfever but it aggravates it.

Our hayfever remedy is based on drawing the extended fluid organization in the body together again so that it becomes a bit cloudy and once again secretes what it had initially dissolved. It is really quite simple and based on nothing more than contracting the fluid organism to its normal size. It first becomes a little cloudy, and you have to watch that what is secreted from the fluidity is not later retained in the body. That is why it is beneficial for a person to perspire somewhat after having been inoculated with the remedy; it is good if he can move about and do something that induces perspiration right after the inoculation. The inoculation is always somewhat problematic when given to a person who is suffering from constipation, and the patient should first be asked if he is constipated. Otherwise, if the fluid organization is contracted, things accumulate too much and are not eliminated right away. This, of course, is not good. A person who is constipated should be given a laxative along with the inoculation.

Healing entails not only applying a medication but also adjusting life accordingly, so that the human body reacts in an appropriate manner to what has been given it. This naturally is of tremendous significance; otherwise, the person can be made even sicker. If you inoculate somebody with a remedy that is quite effective, even exceptionally good, but you do not see to it that the patient's digestion functions properly and that everything the remedy brings about is eliminated, you naturally drive him further into the illness.

With truly effective remedies it is important that the doctor know not only what medicine cures what disease but also what questions to ask the patient. The greatest medical art lies in asking the right questions and in being familiar with the patient. This is extremely important. Yet it is strange, for example, that we meet doctors who frequently have not even asked the patient his age, though this is significant. While he may use the same remedies, a doctor can treat a fifty-year old in a manner completely different from the way he treats one who is forty, for example. They should not be so schematic as to say, “This medication is right for this illness.” For instance, it makes a great difference if you want to cure someone who is constantly afflicted with diarrhoea or someone who has chronic constipation. Such remedies could be tested, and here experiments with animals would be much less objectionable than they are in other areas. Regarding constipation or diarrhoea, you can easily learn how some remedy reacts in the general physical organism that men have in common with the animals by giving the same medicine to both a dog and a cat. The dog regularly suffers from constipation, and the cat from diarrhoea. You can acquire a wonderful knowledge by observing the degree of difference in the medication's effect in the dog or the cat. Scientific knowledge really is not attained by university training in how to do this or that with certain instruments. True science results, rather, when common sense is aroused a little; then people know how they must conduct their experiments.

In sum, it is of prime importance to realize that an illness has its basis in the whole human organization. The individual organ becomes afflicted because the activity of the astral body directs substances to it that have been precipitated from within. The development of certain inner diseases like influenza, hayfever and even typhoid fever becomes comprehensible when we understand how substances improperly deposited in our bodies are dispersed in our fluid organism.

We are not only a “material man” but also a “water man,” and, as I have already explained to you, we are also an “air man,” whose form changes every moment. One moment the air is outside, and the next it is within.

Just as the solid substances that we contain within our bodies as refuse dissolve in the water, so does that water itself constantly evaporate within us. Within the muscles of your little finger, for example, are minute evaporations of water. Water constantly evaporates throughout your whole body. Furthermore, what is evaporating in the fluid organism penetrates into what you inhale as oxygen, which is also a vapor or gas. When water on the ground evaporates, it rises up into the atmosphere, and when water constantly evaporates in delicate processes within the fluid man, it penetrates into the air that we inhale. We cannot tolerate solid substances being dispersed in the fluids, and neither can we tolerate fluids evaporating into the air organism.

Take the case of a person whose lungs have become afflicted because something has occurred like the process that I have just described. This person can become afflicted with a lung disease, which can be cured if it arose from the wrong substances being deposited in the water man. But let us assume that the lung's affliction is not pronounced enough to become apparent. After all, the human organs are sensitive. The condition does not reach the point where the lungs become so strongly afflicted that they are inflamed, but they do become a little indisposed. The person can tolerate this slight indisposition, but substances now enter into his fluid organism that really should penetrate the lungs. In this case, the fluids within the lungs have the wrong kinds of substances dissolved in them; and these substances evaporate, especially if the lungs are not completely well.

Thus, in the case of the quite obvious internal diseases, the water man receives something inappropriate from the solid substances, and in this case something inappropriate reaches the point of evaporation and mingles with the oxygen that is inhaled. The fact that water evaporates inappropriately and unites with oxygen damages the nervous system in particular, because the nerves require healthy oxygen, not oxygen that has evaporations in it from the contaminated fluid of the water man. Contaminated fluid evaporates into the lungs, and this fluid may be responsible for their slight indisposition. Something that should not evaporate does, and this is damaging to the nervous system. The person does not become radically ill, but he does become insane.

It can be said that internal physical illnesses are based on something in man that causes improper substances to be dispersed in his fluid organism. But so-called mental illnesses are in reality not mental at all, because the mind or spirit does not become ill. Mental illnesses are based on body fluids evaporating improperly into oxygen and thereby disturbing the nervous system. This can happen when some organ is so slightly impaired or indisposed that it cannot be detected externally. You see, then, that man must continually process substances correctly so that nothing inappropriate disperses in his fluids and that his fluids in turn do not improperly evaporate. But even in everyday life there is a process that causes improper evaporation of water, and this becomes noticeable when we are thirsty. We cure the thirst by drinking; we free our water, so to speak, from what is inappropriately evaporating within it and wash away what is incorrect.

So we can say that in hunger there is actually the tendency to physical illness, and in thirst there is the predisposition to mental illness. If a man does not properly nourish himself, he forms the basis for organic diseases, and if he does not quench his thirst rightly, he may bring about some form of mental illness. In some circumstances, the improper quenching of thirst is difficult to detect, especially if it occurs in infancy. At this stage one cannot clearly distinguish between assuaging thirst and hunger since both are satisfied by milk. Therefore, if through the mother's milk or that of a wet nurse something harmful comes into the organism, this can much later cause the fluid organism to evaporate incorrectly and thus lead to some mental disorder. Or let us say a person is wrongly inoculated. An ill-chosen inoculation with one or another cow lymph or diseased human lymph can afflict the organs that work upon the water, even though the water itself does not become directly diseased. As a result of an inappropriate inoculation, a person's evaporation processes may not function correctly, and later he may be disposed to some kind of mental illness.

You will have noticed, gentlemen, that nowadays a great many people become afflicted with dementia praecox, so-called “youthful insanity,” which extends, however, quite far beyond the years of youth. This illness, in which people begin mentally to deteriorate in their youth, originates in great part from the wrong kind of feeding during the earliest years of childhood. It is not enough merely to examine chemically the baby's milk; one must look into completely different aspects. Because people have ceased to pay attention to feeding in our age, this illness arises with such vehemence.

You will have realized from all this that it does not suffice simply to train doctors to know that a certain remedy is good for a certain illness. One must rather seek to make the totality of life healthier, and for that one must first discover all that is related to a healthy life. Anthroposophy can provide this understanding. It aims at being effective in the field of hygiene and seeks to comprehend correctly questions of health.

Dear attendees,

In my lecture the day before yesterday, I tried to show the path into the supersensible world that can be taken by modern humanity and which, from our present-day consciousness and stage of human development, we ourselves demand as a requirement, even if we have so far only sensed this inner soul fact rather than consciously followed it. A challenge to go into the supersensible world by other paths than those we have been accustomed to understand until now.

Not so much because I believe that the direct experience of the content, especially in the form of the supersensible world view that I spoke of the day before yesterday, must also underlie the thoughts and impulses of the reorganization of our external public, namely social life, but because I am convinced that in order to penetrate the supersensible from the point of view of today's man, such a transformation of the entire soul life is necessary, as it must take place, in order to solve the great problems, [in order] to solve the social problems of the present, because, simply, as I believe, thinking, feeling must be trained in such thoughts and ideas about the supersensible, as they have been mentioned, I preceded the lecture here last Saturday with today's lecture. Because, my dear attendees, I do believe that a way out of the confusion and chaos of the present social structure is only possible if we look with full awareness and without fear at the radical transformation that we are currently undergoing with regard to our public life. I do not believe that anyone who sees the World War catastrophe as a mere event that interrupts the course of human development, so to speak, and that can subsequently continue in the same way, I do not believe that anyone who views this war catastrophe in this way is inclined to muster the thoughts and feelings that are necessary today for someone who wants to participate in what is necessary to build. It seems to me that only those who, in this world-catastrophe, can truly recognize the collapse of an old spiritual and world view, and who at the same time can recognize the new demands that have not yet taken on a definite form from which one can expect the necessary for the future, but which already announce at least parts of what we have to strive for. But those who are still steeped in the old way of thinking, who have become accustomed to the old social spirit in their thoughts, who are rooted in the old institutions with their habits of life, still cannot bring themselves to really accept that a fundamental transformation is necessary. And still those who come forward with their new demands, honestly and sincerely, cannot bring themselves to look at the reality of life as thoroughly as is necessary to strip these demands of the character of the factions, of the character of abstract programs, and to think them out, to feel them out of the immediate reality of life. Only when humanity has come to see the terrible abyss that has opened up between two sections of the population today will it be on a par with intellectual life and its demands. In fact, we are living in such a transitional period today that we must bring all the details, all the individual characteristics of a downfall before our soul; that on the other hand we must carefully examine everything that asserts itself in a more or less vague way as new demands.

And so, my dear audience, our gaze is not initially turned to what I spoke about last Saturday when we look at the phenomena of the time. Rather, our gaze is directed to that link in life that is, so to speak, opposed to the actual spiritual current of humanity, but from which all the new demands of the present time arise, and where the collapse of all habits of thought and life becomes apparent; our gaze is turned, if we want to understand the actual character of the time, to economic life. And within this economic life, I think it is quite clear that two views of humanity, two ways of feeling humanity, are asserting themselves, between which there is an abyss, and which today can understand each other less than such currents of humanity have ever understood each other within the development of humanity. There is no inclination to look everywhere for what is really characteristic. Above all, there is no inclination to look at the economic life of the present in such a way as to recognize in it forces other than the purely economic ones, which assert themselves both in the collapse and in the new ascent that is to be hoped for. But a comprehensive view must not shy away from drawing attention to these other forces. Therefore, today I will need to speak not only about economic life, but also about everything else that is part of economic life and which must undergo the same renewal and transformation as economic life itself. I will therefore have to speak to you today about the fundamental challenge of our time as a threefold one. I will have to speak of the social question as a spiritual or cultural question, I will have to speak of the social question as a legal or state question; I will have to speak of the social question as an economic question.

But has not this economic life developed in recent times in such a way that we can say: it basically floods everything, and we have become completely dependent with regard to external public life, also with regard to intellectual life and with regard to legal life, completely dependent on the shaping of our economic life.

Let us first look at what we can call the spiritual culture of the present day. This spiritual culture of the present day has received much praise. Time and again, and rightly so from a certain point of view, it has been emphasized how far humanity has come in terms of the development of spiritual life and spiritual culture. Again and again, people have pointed out how magical our intellectual culture must appear to someone who lived a millennium ago and surveys the human intellectual life of that time. Again and again, people have emphasized how, with the help of human resources, thought can now travel at lightning speed across the whole earth. And again and again, the way in which the boundaries that used to be drawn between the individual cultural areas have been overcome in modern times has been emphasized – and much more of the same.

But little consideration has been given to something that is connected, intimately connected, with the basic character of our newer intellectual life. It is connected with this fundamental character of our newer spiritual life that only a small minority of people can participate in this actual spiritual culture. This spiritual culture is such that only this small minority can find their way into what emerges in the most diverse fields of newer spiritual life when it is about the actual spiritual development of this culture, through their thinking habits and their entire way of feeling. We have a rich literary life, a rich artistic life. We have the most diverse world views. We have a developed ethic and so on, and so on. But all this encompasses human impulses, human ideas, human feelings that arise from the particular soul-orientation of a few. And these few must conquer this spiritual life in that the great mass of people simply cannot participate in it. Anyone who takes a broad view of what is actually happening in our culture today knows full well that, on many sides, there is a good will to use all kinds of folk art events, adult education centers and the like to communicate to the great majority what is spiritually conquered by a minority. However good the intentions in this area may be, they do not lead to the goal that they should actually achieve; basically, they only lead to a cultural lie. For, ladies and gentlemen, the nature of intellectual life is such that one can only participate in any form of it if this intellectual life flows from the most original human perceptions and experiences of life. But now our humanity is divided into a small minority, whose habits of life give rise to today's intellectual life, and the great mass, which is devoted only to manual labor, to the external economic life, and within this external economic life develops habits of life, the inner soul condition, and can find no real inner access to what the soul of a minority calls its spiritual life. Today, however much goodwill we may have, we communicate what we produce in the way of science and art through popular events for the masses. We are under a great illusion if we believe that this mass of people can truly absorb into their souls that which a minority is able to regard as its spiritual property. My dear audience, one must actually speak from life experience about this. And so, with reference to what I have just mentioned, please allow me to make a seemingly personal remark, but one that is meant to be symptomatic of what I am discussing here. For many years I was a teacher at a workers' education school. My students were all members of the proletariat. During that time, I tried to present within this workers' educational school what I could directly present from person to person, what I could express in the fields of history and natural science, so that what I expressed was always different from what was presented only last Saturday here in other fields as generally human. And I was actually always well understood, in that I reshaped history in a general human sense, in that I reshaped knowledge of nature in a general human sense. But, as a result of a certain contemporary fashion among the students and the school management, there was also a need for me to lead the students through galleries and the like, for example. And there it turned out that I actually felt like someone who was speaking to people about something, as if I were a complete stranger to them. If I expressed what I took directly from the soul of the people in the school lesson, we understood each other. If I spoke to the people about what the minority had produced as their culture, as their intellectual life, then the message was actually a lie, because people did not find access to what came from completely different psychological backgrounds through their habits of thought, through their feelings. In the ruling circles, people's thoughts were not directed towards such facts and phenomena. Hence the gulf, the abyss between the spiritual culture of the minority and the soul life, the life of the proletarian, who was completely caught up in the economic cycle. What did those who belonged to the minority know, basically, in the last three to four centuries, but especially in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, of what was going on in the souls of the broad masses of the proletariat? He directed these broad masses to work, to work that was created entirely in the direction of the minority culture. But he did not seek access to people, he did not seek access to hearts and souls. This was especially noticeable when he was sought, as happened in the case cited by me.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is approximately what can be said from the spiritual side with regard to the characteristics of one stage of human development. And if you then take a closer look at this spiritual life, this cultural life of the minority, then you have to say that this cultural life, because it is the life of a minority, is alien to the whole of contemporary human life. Despite all our arrogance, we live in an abstract culture; a culture that does not penetrate into the reality of human life. Therefore, it is not surprising that this culture produces a thought life that is actually unrealistic. A thought life that is out of touch with the whole person has the peculiarity that it can also submerge into reality. And if you will allow me to make another personal comment, again only meant as a symptom, it is the following:

In January 1914, I was obliged to summarize, deliberately at the time in Vienna before a small gathering, because a larger one would probably have laughed at me at the time, I was obliged to summarize what had formed in me as an idea, which I was telling, about the whole [course] of this modern cultural life and its way of thinking, what I had to form as an idea about the direction in which this cultural life is heading. And I had to summarize these insights, I believe I may call them that, at that time – that is, in the early spring of 1914 – about what is brought into the world of men through the contradictions in this intellectual life. I had to summarize it by saying: Our social conditions, right up to the highest levels, give the impression of a social disease, a social cancer, to anyone who observes them impartially, and this must express itself in a terrible way throughout the civilized world in the near future.

That was the opinion of an “impractical idealist” back then, as they say today; the opinion of someone who wants to decide something about reality from their own point of view. Today, we can be reminded of such a view of reality when we consider how, on the other hand, those who had emerged from the intellectual culture of the minority with its unrealistic sense of reality thought at the time about what was to come. Let us recall that in January 1914, a directing statesman summarized his views, despite the responsibility that weighed on him, in the words he said at the time to a parliamentary body: “We live in a general relaxation of political conditions,” he said, “which gives us hope of maintaining peace in Europe in the near future.” And he added: We are on the most friendly terms with the Russian government, which, thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, is not getting involved in the lies of the press pack. And we certainly think – the statesman in question spoke as a statesman of Central Europe – we certainly think to continue our friendly relations with Poland. And he adds, so at that time: negotiations are in progress with England that promise the very best for European peace. They have not yet been concluded, but they will bring about desirable conditions.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the train of thought of a person who is well-informed about the present and who lived at the time of the terrible world catastrophe that followed, which killed thousands and thousands of people in Europe and left three times as many maimed. The lesson to be learned from this global catastrophe is that, to the very depths of the soul, the culture of the minority has lost its sense of, its instinct for realities. These things are to be taken more seriously than ever. And they will only be taken seriously if we do not want to ignore the fact that the ideas that emerged from this unrealistic basis were simply not suited to bringing fruitful ideas into our economic life. People still do not want to admit this today. But this is the most important fact of economic life in modern times: the ruling circles have lost the comprehensive ideas of this economic life, and therefore, for a long period of time, this economic life has run its course throughout the entire civilized world as if it were running mechanically by itself. And the catastrophe of the world wars is nothing more than the result of allowing the economy to be driven into its own contradictions and destruction. This was due to the fact that within modern spiritual culture these thoughts were not taken from reality and therefore could not master and control this reality. Thus the leading and ruling circles pursued an economic policy which, by maintaining old institutions, actually destroyed life. But they never took the trouble to organize this economic life on a human basis. But within this economic life there arose something from the hearts and souls of those who, through their work, were merely harnessed to this economic life. And by looking at this, we come to the other side of the abyss; to the side where those stand who could not participate in the indicated way in the spiritual culture of the minority, who, since the advent of modern technology and modern capitalism, have been completely harnessed with all their humanity to this technology, to this capitalism that is emptying of meaning.

Now I would like to say: everything that I have characterized as a minority spiritual culture, as a certain attitude towards the broad masses of working proletarians, and as an attitude towards the mechanical course of economic life, which is noticeable on the one hand, has found its echo on the other. And this echo develops slowly, little by little. Only then will one do justice to the present time if one sees in this world catastrophe the leading of the spiritual and economic life ad absurdum, which I have just described. But now, from the other side, for more than half a century, there has been the sound of what once ended in the words, the world-shattering words: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” And the catastrophe of the world wars has brought about the era in which everything that has since taken hold in the hearts and souls of the broadest circles of the proletariat under the influence of that from which that call arose has been realized. It has brought all this about and summarized it in a new way.

Therefore, the present is even more permeated with the necessity of pointing out with understanding what stands like an echo on the other side of the abyss. There we see that the proletarian masses look at the intellectual culture of the minority, which was to be given to them through all kinds of popular events and everything that is connected with the minority's intellectual life and habits, and there we see that the proletarian masses look at all this because they could not participate in it; and they found it understandable when their ingenious leader, who is just as great in his truths as he is great in his fallacies, when Karl Marx gave them the word, which characterized their relationship to the life of the minority in a way that could be misunderstood, generally misunderstood, but all the more understandable to the hearts of the masses, in the words “surplus value” and “labor performance”. And more or less clearly, large masses of proletarians were seized by the awareness, one might say, not to understand everywhere, but to feel: What we have as a relationship between what elevates religiously, what satisfies artistically, what warms as a worldview for the minorities, that is, we create the basis for this intellectual culture of the minorities by generating the capital base through the added value, through what is taken from what we have produced, from the proceeds of our products, beyond what is only compensation for our labor. And we must not judge the present time merely from the external standpoint of political economy; we shall not do justice to it; we must also judge it from the standpoint of the mass psychology of humanity. Here it is not a matter of whether one can discuss a word like surplus value more or less accurately, but rather how such a word works in the masses; how it arouses feelings, what hopes it inspires. These hopes are entirely in line with what I have just characterized. And more and more closely and more and more accurately did these proletarian masses see what their share is in that which lives as a spiritual culture, and what as a spiritual culture also guides legal and economic life. And that is why they also understood a second word, which was coined for them from the same source; they understood the word about the labor power of man, which can be bought as a commodity on the labor market, just as other commodities can be bought and sold. It may be that intellectually they did not grasp what was meant by this, but they felt it. By being made aware of this word, and hearing it from sources that were more or less clear or obscure, they sensed their way back to ancient times, when slavery still prevailed and when the whole human being could be bought and sold on the labor market like a thing or an animal. And they looked to the somewhat later period of serfdom, when fewer, but still enough human strength and labor were harnessed in bondage. And they sensed something of that personality consciousness that has gripped the hearts and souls in the development of humanity, as I explained the day before yesterday, since the middle of the fifteenth century. And they sensed: The time is past when something like a commodity, like a thing, can be sold by man. And they felt: the leading, guiding circles have failed to see the moment when the labor force must be stripped of the character of the commodity. And in one way or another, more or less clear or unclear, this demand “stripping the labor force of the character of the commodity” arises. Such was the answer to the lack of understanding shown by the leading, leading circles for the great masses of the proletariat.

And another point was also made, which must be taken into account if, in as naive a way as Woodrow Wilson does, one treats the social question of the present day only as a production question. It is certainly a production question, but the fact that it has only become a production question is precisely the fault and the neglect of the leading and guiding circles. What has developed in humanity over the last three to four centuries, ladies and gentlemen, is not only the newer economic life with its expanded technology and its capitalism. It is also a very specific direction of intellectual life. This spiritual life is not only the spiritual life of the minority, as I have characterized it, but a very specific direction of the spiritual life has moved into humanity.

When we look back to earlier times, there was also a religious, artistic spiritual life; a spiritual life that is now more or less regarded as a fantasy life. We do not want to talk about that now. But it was a spiritual life that provided people with a living world view, with an inner momentum; it placed people in the development of humanity and in the social order in such a way that each person could, in some way, find the answer from this spiritual life, how they are connected as spirit, as soul, with the spirit, with the soul of the world. He received the answer to the question: Do I have a dignified existence in the whole world? This possibility ceased under the influence of what came from modern science to meet man. This newer scientific attitude and orientation has ultimately lost all connection with the foundations of existence; it is directed only at the exterior of existence. In the end, one no longer had the feeling: a super-sensible element shines into your thoughts, into your ideas – but one had the feeling: the thoughts, the ideas are only thoughts, only ideas. One did not admit this to oneself; one retained the gesture of the old religious, the old artistic and other world-view feeling; but what one shaped anew was formed in such a way that it could not fulfill man as a whole. The proletarian, who had been snatched from the social situation in which he had formerly lived, to the machine, into soul-destroying capitalism, the proletarian, he truly could not believe in what had been revealed to the leading, guiding circles as the content of this spiritual life. They still spoke in the old formulas, which speak of a divine world order, a moral world order, expressing itself in the historical becoming of humanity. The proletarian was trapped in the mere economic order, in capitalism, which orients and guides this mere economic order. He felt nothing but: what is developing in the newer intellectual life is mere phrase, mere ideology; only the economic life has truth; only the economic order has truth! And so the view resounded again and again, especially in the leading thinking people of the proletariat: everything spiritual, everything artistic, everything religious, everything scientific, everything legal, everything moral is something that rises like a smoke from the only real, from the economic basis of existence, which is the only reality.

Yes, with such a view it is possible to think, it is possible to know – what is usually called knowing – but it is not possible to live with such a view, because the soul becomes desolate with it, because the soul is finally withdrawn from everything that can answer the question: Do I live a dignified human existence? The soul is driven to a mere brutal belief in the external product and its effectiveness. This ideology, it did not educate the proletariat! This disbelief in the spirit, the proletariat did not educate it. All this is the last legacy that the proletariat has inherited from the leading, guiding circles. It has inherited it in good faith, believing that it must be the newer worldview. And everything that has become soul-destroying in the hearts and minds of the proletarians comes from this side. And so we see what it looks like on the other side of the abyss. And we become aware that the proletariat, when it looks at the intellectual life that the modern age has brought forth, has finally said: In the end, it is only the smoke and sound of what is rising from the economic life, the actual basis of human life, the life of the leading, guiding circles. We want nothing to do with that!

And the other consciousness arose in the proletarian: these leading, guiding circles have separated themselves from us by taking possession of the old structure of economic life and shaping the life of the minority from it. But they have left us to be a second-class class, and our relationship to them is not that of man to man; our relationship to them is actually that of a disadvantaged class to a privileged class. And it is a cliché when they speak of the divine, the moral world order, of the ideas that live in history, of the spiritual powers, because all this comes from the economic order. And from a different economic order must come that which satisfies us as they are satisfied by their spiritual and other culture, their culture of life in the minority! What is called “historical materialism” arose out of these feelings.

From the threefold path, the proletariat has learned how a gulf has arisen between itself and the leading, guiding circles, in the way of the spiritual life in the way I have mentioned. But then, as this intellectual life developed and the minority had to draw in the broad masses of the proletariat for its work, something else arose. What is called the newer human formation had to be more or less carried into the broad masses. What was the result of this? Yes, a special fact emerges. The fact that when one quality of the soul develops, another develops at the same time. One of these was the one that developed through the intellectuality of the proletariat, in that democratic education, education of the people, was carried into the proletariat. But as this quality developed, something else developed as a general human world consciousness. There has been much talk about this consciousness today. For those who look at the things of this world impartially, this consciousness today is an elementary emanation of the human being itself. Just as one cannot really discuss color with someone who does not have a healthy eye, one cannot discuss what is a universal human right with a human soul that has not awakened. But it was possible to discuss these universal human rights with the proletarian soul, which was increasingly awakening from patriarchal conditions. And a clear awareness arose of the right that man has by being human. From this consciousness the proletarian looked at what the ruling and leading circles had taken over from the state and made it into a living right. And he found not this human right, but the right of favored classes and the disadvantage of other classes. That was what ate deeper and deeper into the souls of the proletarians. And that was the cause of the second ordeal, the legal process, and the third was what necessarily resulted from the proletarian being completely harnessed into economic life and capitalism; that he could not, like the others, find the [leisure] and rest from work, could not find human development through education to participate in what beautifies the life of the minority. That was what he felt, while he had to say to himself: I am only harnessed into economic life; I am basically only a wheel in economic life. The whole of human life is for me a running off of this economic life. I am harnessed like a machine into this economic life.

That is the third ordeal that the proletariat went through. This threefold suffering of the proletariat, if properly followed and compared with what lives on the other side of the abyss in the way I have characterized, leads to seeking that which must first be striven for from our present-day consciousness, again in a threefold way: in the life of the spirit, in the life of right or state, and in the life of the economy. And that in relation to these three ways of life, something must be striven for from the consciousness of modern humanity, is evident in three fundamental demands of modern times, which have been clearly expressed, but which have nevertheless remained more or less generalities and have not been fully incorporated into our modern life.

Over the past few centuries, the call for liberalism has been rising more and more in human consciousness. Today a word that is no longer held in high regard. Likewise, the call for democracy is rising. And thirdly, the call for socialism is becoming ever clearer and clearer. From this or that side, one could not resist the one or other impulse expressed in these three; but one nevertheless tried to remain in the old conditions and to let what is announced in these three expressions flow into the old conditions, to press it into them. They simply took the old unified state and tried to shape it in a liberal, democratic and social way. Today we live in an age in which it must be recognized that the error lies in living under the suggestion of this unified state and believing that what is expressed in liberalism, democracy and socialism can be pressed into this unified state.

Let us take democracy, which has emerged as an impulse as the middle way in modern humanity. Does not the call for democracy express everything that I have just characterized as emerging from the human sense of right and wrong? Does not the call for democracy express the impulse for something that makes every human being equal to every other human being in the world? Is there not something in it that says that every mature human being has a say in everything that simply affects the position of the human being in the world? Once this has been thought out, the necessity for the development of a democratic state order arises. Democratic state orders are developed in which every person of legal age deals more or less directly with every other person of legal age through representation, and in which each person is to be equal to the other. In the course of modern development, it was impossible to resist what lives in humanity as such an impulse of democracy. And they tried to permeate what they took over historically as the old states with this democratic element in the modern parliaments. They did not realize that two elements of life do not fit into this democratic element, especially if it is to be understood honestly and sincerely. As true as it is that every mature human being must decide on everything in which each person is equal to the other, and as true as it is that this must be experienced and regulated from the standpoint of democratic parliamentarism , it is just as true that the moment this democratic element is allowed to decide on the one hand over economic life and on the other hand over intellectual life, it leads to impossibilities.

Let us first consider economic life. Economic life is based on the fact that the individual human being works his way into the economic knowledge of the individual profession and branch of production in the course of his life. Only someone who is not just theoretically, but through having experienced it, is inside a profession or branch of production, only such a person can decide what is necessary in that profession or branch of production. Only those who have grown together with any profession through which this or that is produced can be trusted in this economic life. In short, any branch of production in economic life, harnessed to democracy, becomes an impossibility, because then the one who does not understand it and does not understand it or who is involved in one economic sector, decides by majority, he decides over those who are involved in completely different sectors, of which he understands nothing. We have seen how terribly this lack of understanding of the relationship between democracy and economic life has manifested itself in those states that have proven to be least mature, above all, in the sub... [gap in the transcript]. But anyone who has lived there for half their life, three decades of life, and has been involved in Austrian political life, knows where the damage lies, which has ultimately led to the fact that such terrible horrors have befallen Austria, that Austria has collapsed so terribly in this world war catastrophe. Because, you see, when people in this patriarchal-clerical Austria in the 1860s worked to get out of the old conditions, to at least take the modern call for liberalism and democracy into account by means of a people's representation – how was this people's representation shaped? They were formed in such a way that four electoral curiae were created: large estates, cities and markets, chambers of commerce and industry, rural communities; all economic curiae. The representatives were people who had to represent the economic interests of individual groups. These people now formed the Austrian parliament. What did they actually do there? What did they strive for? Nothing other than the mere transformation of economic interests into human-legal conditions, into state conditions, into security conditions. The state's mutual human relationships should arise from what was decided in the interest of individual economic circles. It was believed that only economic interests needed to be transformed in order to create legal interests. Anyone who has been able to follow the development of Austria knows that in this construction of state life out of mere economic conditions, the damage that must necessarily lead to ruin has arisen. And as with this example, so could be substantiated by numerous examples for other states, that it is impossible to forge together that which emerged as a democratic demand in modern times with that which has been shaped in economic life.

The same question arises with regard to intellectual life and intellectual culture as a whole. It is impossible for decisions to be made on a democratic basis about what is actually at stake in intellectual culture. In the case of intellectual culture, it is essential that everything that arises, let us say, from unknown sources as human, individual abilities and talents, be developed according to purely spiritual principles; according to those principles that look impartially at what can develop spiritually and individually in the human being, right down to the physical working capacity. But in modern times, the entire care for this development of the individual human abilities has been relegated to the state. This has come about through quite understandable historical facts. In more recent times, when it became necessary to wrest the state side of the church's educational system from certain underground sources, it was justified to hand over certain branches, namely the public branches, the branches of education and instruction, to the state, to which one had to adhere, as the spiritual life. Time and again, it turned out that this spiritual life became a mere copy of the state; that ultimately, in what people produced spiritually, it was not what lives that springs from the direct nature of the human being, what the spiritual produces in the human being, but that what emerged in the spiritual life was what corresponded to the interests and needs of the state. No wonder that eventually – and the world war catastrophe showed this terribly – no wonder that this intellectual life remained free in a few individual branches, in art or the like; that the rest of the intellectual life became nothing but a copy, a reflection of the utilitarian demands and interests of modern states. And as the modern states have become more and more economic entities due to the increasing complexity of economic life, intellectual life was ultimately only an expression of economic life.

The proletariat saw what recent times have done to intellectual life. The proletariat saw this and believed that this was the absolute truth, that intellectual life always only emerges from economic life. That is the great error of the modern proletariat, to take an appearance for something absolute. That is the great error of Marxism, that it does not look at the fact that precisely through the development of the last three to four centuries, on the way I have indicated, the spiritual life has been absorbed by the state, which has increasingly become an economic body, and that we are under the effect of this fact today; but it is not right to say: Let us change the economic life, then a different intellectual life and a different legal life will come. Rather, it is necessary today to say: the spiritual life must be made free again; the spiritual life must be torn away from the state order; the spiritual life must be placed on its own ground. In the future, only that which emerges from the spiritual foundations of the human being may be expressed in the spiritual life. The spiritual life must not be a mere mirror image of the state or economic life.

On the basis of these documents, what first emerged in my appeal “To the German People and to the Cultural World” and then in my book “The Key Points of the Social Questions in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future” has now been developed and is represented by the Federation for Social Threefolding in its various branches. What this book seeks to do is to dispel the suggestion that the social organism must be a unified state, which, on the one hand, is completely submerged by economic life and, on the other, absorbs spiritual life.

No, what is necessary for the future is to place economic life on its factual and professional basis, to lift this economic life out of the democratic parliament. Only then will it be possible to socialize this economic life when this economic life is placed on its own ground in such a way that those people who are of the same profession, of the same profession as manual laborers, as intellectual workers, join together in associations; when those people who comprise certain consumer and production circles join together in other associations. When such economic communities arise, linked together by federal foundations, then negotiations will be conducted from profession to profession, from consumerism or rather linked together with production branches to other branches. Then it will no longer be possible for a parliament based on democratic principles to decide on economic interests with a majority of people who decide only out of self-interest or ignorance. Then, from profession to profession, from branch of production to branch of production, the interests of economic life will be served by free economic behavior. Then nothing else will occur within this economic life than that which will lead to the fair regulation of the mutual prices of commodities. Then nothing else will assert itself in this economic life but the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities. Above all, everything that must be administered on a democratic basis must be eliminated, above all human labor and capital. Where does human labor lead us? Today, human labor is at the center of economic life. I have pointed out that the proletariat is aware that the wage relationship in economic life is treated like other commodities. The commodity labor power is bought through wages. Labor power must be removed from economic life in terms of its dimensions, in terms of its nature, and then only the mutual value of the commodity will be contained in the prices of the goods. Then the price of the goods will not contain what is contained in the wage situation today. Then, in the field of economic life, decisions will only be made about the price of the goods, which is separate from the human being. Then, in the field of legal or state life, political life, security life, decisions will be made about the extent, type and time of human work. The regulation of human work will be a legal relationship. The regulation of human labor will not be such that the economic coercive relationship has an influence on it. Rather, only that which is decided on the basis of democracy will have an influence on the determination of the human labor force, where every person who has come of age decides on what is due to every person who has come of age. The regulation of the human labor force belongs in the democratic legal order. If this human labor is regulated by democracy, then the worker enters the economic body as a person who freely disposes of his labor and does not conclude an employment contract, which can never contain justice, but a contract for services with those who, as spiritual leaders, are involved in this service. Then the contract is simply concluded on the basis of the earnings and the services provided. Then the regulation of labor is completely separated from economic life.

In the light of their prejudices, this seems completely incredible to people today, to the extent that even a thinker like [Rathenau] believes that such a detachment of the labor force from the economic cycle is not possible. It is possible precisely because what depends on natural conditions is not included in the economic cycle; what the soil yields and what climatic conditions determine must be accepted in economic life. What raw materials are in the soil and how they can be extracted must be accepted as given. This cannot be decided according to so-called economic cycles. In the same way, in the future, it will no longer be permissible to decide, on the basis of economic conditions, what the worker receives. This will be decided by mature people on democratic ground. With this decision, the worker will enter into the economic cycle and conclude a contract in which his labor provides a basic condition, like the natural conditions themselves. The economic process will be constrained on the one hand by natural conditions and on the other by legal conditions. This is what the broad masses of humanity unconsciously demand. One need only understand this unconscious demand; one need only raise it into consciousness and formulate it; then one will perceive with clarity what is so terribly confusing in life today, which manifests itself as social ambiguity. What this path, the threefold social order, is pointing to, is a real path to clarity about the abstract demands that are being raised today. If someone says: Abolish the wage relationship! —, then one can say that for a long time. As long as one does not show a way to overcome this wage relationship, it remains an abstract demand that only has a disturbing effect, that only arouses the elementary instincts of human nature, but that leads to nothing. The moment one realizes that, with regard to public institutions, economic life must be completely separated from legal life, that labor law, as a prerequisite for economic life, must be developed on the basis of democratic legal life, one can show an economic path that can be taken every day from any starting point. For it is impossible to follow such a path tomorrow if one only has the good will to do so. And the same applies to the capital conditions that are currently wedged into economic life.

Oh, people have actually already completely forgotten what the origin of capitalism actually is. The origin of capitalism is diverse. For example, it is based on the fact that in older times land was conquered and thus passed into private ownership, and those over whom the conquests extended came into dependency, into ownershiplessness. It is based on the fact that from what resulted from the conquests as property, the possibility was offered to bring the power conditions of modern times, the means of production, into the private, selfish possession of the individual. In view of what has just been mentioned, the proletariat in turn formulates a demand: the abolition of capital. In its naivety, it does not realize that the words “abolition of capital” actually say nothing, even if they are repeated over and over again. They express what they feel is fair, but they do not take into account that these modern conditions are such, in their economic and other configurations, that one must work with capital in modern social life. Even if you transform the whole modern state into a large cooperative, as some socialists want, nothing else but capital could work in it either, only instead of today's private owners, the [bureaucratic] official would take their place. And those who today, as proletarians, raise this demand would very soon notice how they are much worse off under these newer conditions than under the present ones. Here, by thinking out of reality, one must think quite differently about the conditions of capital. One must also be clear about the fact that it is ultimately the fundamentals of human abilities that lead the individual to have a certain superiority over others. The fact that the individual has acquired a certain superiority makes it possible to collect the means of production and the means of production that made him the leader and that enabled him to transfer to others what he achieved as the leader. Those who think this through carefully, who judge it according to reality, judge it impartially, know, my dear attendees, that all capital is based on the ability of the individual human being, and that this individual ability of the human being must not be eliminated. If you replace the individual, capable person who manages the production processes with the abstract generality, it will only lead to the dismantling or depletion of economic life, not to its reconstruction. But that does not mean that the old institutions should live on, that, as is currently happening, what is capital or the means of production should always be transferred again in the sense of the old order. Rather, it can be replaced by the old order, by which, little by little, those people come into possession of capital in the form of money capital and rent, who no longer have anything to do with production, with the application of individual abilities in the management of economic life, come into possession of capital. What must be opposed to the old economic order is directed against this. It must also be quite possible in the new economic order that capital is concentrated through the abilities of the individual human being, but that only as long as this individual human being, who has brought together these capitals, that is, means of production, remains the head, or in any case remains in a context with these means of production, as his individual abilities can be connected with it. Then, in the ways I have indicated in my book The Core of the Social Question, the capital, or the sum of the means of production, passes through legal transfer to those who in turn have the best individual abilities. This introduces what I call the circulation of capital in the social organism. This circulation of capital, or of property, has always been admitted on spiritual ground, at least in principle, to a certain extent. If today one expects of people that what they admit on spiritual ground should also occur in the field of material possessions, then they certainly make astonished faces. What I produce spiritually remains spiritually mine and the property of my heirs only for a certain time; then it passes into the public domain, in which everyone who has the individual ability to do so can administer it. Similarly, in the future, what is acquired as material property must be transferred to the person who can best manage and administer it through individual abilities. Then there will be harmony between the physically and spiritually working. Then capital, which always originates from individual abilities, will not be able to pass over to those who do not justify ownership through individual abilities. Rather, individual abilities will always remain connected with the management of the means of production. Then the person who has work to do under such management will say to himself: My work thrives best when the circulation of capital takes place in this way, that a sum of means of production always passes to the one who has the best abilities; for he manages my work best.

It is certainly not the case that the impulse for the threefold social order should be accused of false idealism. Those who say that it will take other people to carry it out do not take into account that this impulse for the threefold social order is based on the people we have at present. The manual laborer has an egoistic interest in always having the best leader at hand. But this can only be achieved if the means of production are circulated in this way. But this requires, ladies and gentlemen, that we break with the principle that the means of production are a commodity like those goods that are consumed directly by human needs. A means of production, that is, one in which capital is invested, may only be able to claim capital as long as it costs something until it is finished. The locomotive may only be considered capital until it is finished. Then it ceases to have an external commodity value. Then it only passes to the one who knows how to manage it best in the interest of the whole through transfer or through legal relationships. Land will be... [gap in transcript] from the very beginning.

Today, people still oppose such things out of prejudice, which is rooted not only in habitual ways of thinking but also in the habits of life associated with old institutions. But those who cannot bring themselves to realize that the terrible catastrophe of the world wars calls upon us to think not in terms of a small reckoning, but in terms of a great reckoning, will only contribute to further decline and to destruction, but never to escape from destruction. Thus we see that simply economic life, in which only the production, circulation and consumption of goods may occur, must be separated from the regulation of labor, from the administration of capital. And what must occur in our entire life through this detour that I have just described? That capital, that is, the means of production, must always be administered by the person who has the individual abilities to do so. What must come about is the detachment of the spiritual life from our economic and legal life. This spiritual life must be placed on its own ground. So that in the future, no longer will some experts, merely harnessed into state bureaucracy and torn out of the spiritual life, participate in the administration, but that this spiritual life will be organized from factual foundations entirely by itself, through its self-administration. In the future, the life of the social organism must be shaped in such a way that the spiritual life is administered by those who are at the same time somehow directly involved in the production of this spiritual life. If we look at this spiritual life in particular, on the basis of education and teaching, then only those people who participate in education, from the lowest elementary school teacher to the highest university teacher, must be part of the spiritual organism. In the future, anyone who teaches in any field will only have to teach so much that they still have time left over from this teaching to help administer. That is to say, the production of the spirit and the administration of spiritual life will be carried out in one combined activity. No state school system, no connection between intellectual life and economic life; completely self-contained, so that the lowest elementary school merely aims to artistically acquire knowledge of man or anthropology in the broadest sense, so that from the age of six to fourteen, the child is taught in such a way that this teaching leads solely to the development of the strengths that the child needs in life. This will automatically lead to a unified school, not one that is dictated by the state. Everything that is built up will arise from general human needs. For example, at the secondary schools, the design will be such that at certain school levels, teaching is geared to the fact that the person who has received the teaching is suitable for entering into this or that state system. The opposite must happen: that the school levels are designed according to pedagogical-didactic, spiritual principles, and people will have achieved this or that at 17, at 19 years of age, and the state will have to ask itself: how do I use people who have been educated according to spiritual principles? The state will have to adapt to the spiritual life. The universities will have to have autonomy; they will be the administrators in the highest sense of the spiritual teaching and education system itself.

I can only sketch out all this. It should only be expressed that in this field of spiritual life, a struggle of spiritual efficiency with spiritual efficiency must really take place. Furthermore, that which can be called comprehensive liberalism must be allowed to develop.

In the sphere of state life, in the sphere where decisions are made about the transfer of capital, about the administration of labor law, that which has emerged as democratic impulses will come to fruition.

In the economic sphere, what serves the circulation of goods and human abilities will give full rein to the socialization that has emerged in recent times; the individual spheres of economic life will be linked according to objective principles, where only goods and their production are administered, not people. Then it will be possible to produce in the economic life out of associations, which get to know the needs of the people in a liberal way, not through statistics or other connections, but which get to know them in a liberal way. It will be possible to produce in such a way that the abstract demands of the proletariat are transformed into more concrete demands, into a real path. The proletariat has emphasized that in the future production should not be for profit, but for consumption. But consumption is only possible if the associations of the socially organized economic cycle really create such connections between producers and consumers that production is not based on the randomness of supply and demand on markets, but on a careful, understanding, and appropriate study of needs. It will be necessary to understand and, above all, follow the laws of economics quite differently than they are followed in today's random relationship between supply and demand. We will have to know that at the moment when too many workers are employed in a branch of production, production in that branch of production is too cheap. Human labor is being wasted. Workers must be directed through negotiations and contracts to other branches of production. If too little is produced somewhere, the article will become too expensive; then other workers will have to be directed into that branch of production.

In short, in the future there must be in socialist, capitalist economic life what is now being established through the efforts of the Federation for Threefolding as the institution of the free [works councils], to which the traffic councils, the economic councils, this whole system, will later be joined. But this is not a political system, because the political must be based on democracy. This system of councils, rooted in economic life, which is only concerned with the proper administration of economic life, is the system that will emerge to the surface of modern life, not through the arbitrary demands of individuals, but through the legitimate demands of the times. The institute of the advisers will be such a body, which does not rule by bureaucratic or democratic coercive laws, but which rules by negotiations from person to person, from council to council, from economic association to economic association. If the labor force is distributed across individual branches of production in such a way that every commodity, every good that people need, is produced in such a quantity as is needed for it. Then such prices arise, then in economic life there is that which can form the basis for fair prices to prevail in economic life, whereas, since we have wages in economic life, which, as a commodity, corresponds to the labor force, you can increase wages, ... [gap in the transcript] the prices of goods also increase because no just legal relationship can be established as long as something is included in economic life that does not belong in it, namely human labor, which belongs in legal life.

Thus we see, my dear attendees, that in the future what has had such a suggestive effect on people must be structured as a unified state, in the three-part social organism, in the independent spiritual life, administered according to its own requirements; in the democratic state or political life, in which it is decided, directly and indirectly, by each mature person, what concerns him as an equal to every other person. This also includes property and working conditions. In the future, economic life, in which only appropriate administration by economic associations and bodies takes place, will be the third independent element. These three areas will get along with each other. It is well known, for example, that members of the intellectual professions have concerns and cannot live because the state does not pay them enough. It will become clear in the future that, just as the proletariat must be paid as teachers, only that the path must be different. The spiritual corporations will belong to the economic body in the same way as they belong to the economic body as consumers, and the appropriate relationship will have to be established. This regulation will only be one reason why the individual elements of legal, economic and spiritual life will come together harmoniously, precisely because each one can really work in its own field of expertise.

And there is no need to be afraid of how international relations will judge these things. What I have presented here first arose from a consideration of the international conditions that led to our terrible war catastrophe. Anyone who has studied the development of modern humanity over the decades that preceded this catastrophe knows, for example, how the Balkan issues arose from the interweaving of the three areas of intellectual or cultural life, political or legal life and economic life down there in south-eastern Europe, insofar as they affected the relationship between the Balkans and Austria; that they then led to the outbreak of the world war from this side. First of all, there was the general cultural question of the cultural and intellectual conflict between the Slavs and the Germans. To what extent there was a legal question when the old conservative Turkish element was replaced by the Young Turkish element, the Turkish-Bulgarian question, for example, the history of the Sanjak railway, if you study it, you can see that there were economic interests from Austria to the Balkans. If these circumstances could have been organized out of their own foundations, something else would have emerged than this tangle of circumstances. It was this tangle that brought about such international conflicts. You can also study the problem of the Baghdad Railway. There, too, you will see how the cultures of the nations involved are constantly intermingled with the political, legal and economic aspects. And again and again we see how the economic becomes more powerful than the cultural, and thus again and again another state is on top, for example with the problem of the Baghdad Railway, and so on. It is precisely in international relations that this interweaving of the three areas, which on the ground of each social organism must become three links, plays a terrible role. The only hope for the development of humanity in the future lies in the threefold social organism, in an independent spiritual life with its own administration, in a democratic legal life, in an independent economic life that administers itself from within through its own nature in associations and corporations, in cooperatives. And anyone who studies what is hidden in this terrible, horrific war catastrophe and in what has now emerged from it, need only look to the East and they will find that behind these conditions, which prevailed in the East and which today lead to such terrible exploitation out of misunderstood social impulses, live the great spiritual impulses of the Russian and other Eastern peoples. These spiritual impulses are smouldering beneath the surface today, and they must first work their way up again from what has been superimposed by prejudices of civilization and what lurks as a threatening social spectre from the East towards Central Europe. To prevent this from happening in Central Europe, efforts should be made to ensure that in Central Europe, what is being confused in the East is not confused, but that in Central Europe, intellectual life, state or legal life, economic life are separated.

And let us look to the West. These Western states have essentially brought it about that economic life is developed. They permeate the world economy; they expand private competition to the great imperialistic conditions. That which prevails there one-sidedly as economic life corrupts state and spiritual life. Here in Central Europe, these three areas must be separated. If we have not yet grasped this through the lessons of the terrible catastrophe of the war, we will grasp it out of the necessity into which the threefold unnatural foundations of modern development have brought us, since the time I mentioned the day before yesterday, around the middle of the fifteenth century, began. People longed for a spiritual life, but a new spiritual life did not arise. The spiritual life was not placed on the own ground of the modern spiritually producing personalities. Only the Reformation and the Renaissance, a renewal of the old, came up. Today we live in a great, important time. Today we must not be content with a renaissance of an old spiritual life; today we must appeal to a completely new spiritual life. But this cannot flourish in the shadow of economic life, in the shadow of a state order. It can only flourish if it is free to stand on its own.

Let us look to the East; there we can see how it was initially intellectual life that had an effect, with economic and legal interests only hiding behind it. At first, it was the case that the Banat peoples were to be liberated from Russia. This was based on genuine popular instincts. Confounded with this was what should not be confounded with it.

And then the French Revolution, one sees the same thing happening there. This French Revolution was a different kind of Renaissance. People thirsted for human rights. Rights only came into humanity, a renaissance of state life, to which we also devoted ourselves in Central Europe in the nineteenth century.

But a new legal life is demanded of man as such. In the sphere of the legal life, we have no need of a renaissance, of Roman or other legal conceptions. We need a thorough separation of the legal life from the intellectual and economic life, from which no relationship of power, either spiritual or physical, of one man over another, may arise. Only that which places all mature men on an equal footing may arise from the democratic state. From all this an economic life has developed, in relation to which it is believed that it is sovereign. In Eastern Europe, it is intended to regulate legal-political life and spiritual life from mere economic life. In this way it will be possible to achieve a mere administration of goods, but only such an administration of goods which, instead of founding a new human right, breaks down the old rights and cannot replace them with anything; which, instead of founding a new spiritual life, lets the old spiritual life fade away and finally seep away, and transforms everything into the mechanism of an economic life. Only when they have overcome the old order, which was rightly called the service of throne and altar, will people see whether they have achieved something better. But this service to the throne and the altar must not merely give way to service to the office and the machine in the mechanized economy; rather, the future must bring us an independent economic life in which the individual corporations and associations and cooperatives join together fraternally in genuine socialization. But this can only be built up if it is supported by a democratic state in which man finds his rights as an equal alongside other equals. And economic life, which otherwise would dry up and become rigid, can be stimulated when there is a free spiritual life constantly producing forces and sending them into life, which do not produce a reality-strange world of ideas and science, a reality-strange spiritual culture, but which produce a spiritual culture that can be applied to all areas of life. We have imitated the Renaissance in its love of all things Greek, but the Renaissance created a spiritual life for itself. We need a spiritual life that is suitable only for our present time. And, however strange it may sound, the more spiritual, the more practical this spiritual life will be; and the more we will be able to really intervene in state and economic life. Only it will be the spirit that can fertilize capital; that calls upon labor, the same service for the same service for all. Not as it is today, where production is merely for the market. Only then will we understand what it actually meant when, in the course of the nineteenth century, very clever people reflected on the great motto of the end of the eighteenth century: liberty, equality, fraternity, and said – truly not out of prejudice – that liberty must contradict equality, and that ultimately, everything that lives in liberty and equality is incompatible with fraternity. It turned out that there are contradictions between what one perceives as freedom, as equality and as fraternity, that is, between the three great, public ideals of humanity. How is it possible that three ideals can stand, as if born out of the innermost, most honest striving of the human heart and soul, and yet contradict each other? The reason for this, ladies and gentlemen, is that these three ideals have so far been established from the point of view of the unitary state. As long as we believe that these three ideals, liberty, equality, fraternity, must live in the unitary state, we will find contradictions in them. The future must understand that this unitary state must not bundle together three areas of life that must be administered from different bases. The future must understand that this unitary state, as a social organism, must be divided into three areas, and that in the future the spirit must prevail in freedom. That man must live as the owner of his human rights in democratic equality. That work for the needs of the people must be done in associations, in cooperatives, in short, through brotherhoods on a large scale, out of economic brotherhood. Only when we are no longer under the influence of the unitary state will we be able to hear the call of the future clearly enough.

If we have so far been somewhat shy in Central Europe about directing our thoughts, our feelings, our habits of life to the three spheres of life in their true form – since Versailles, since we have been living under the prospect of much adversity and misery still We will perhaps find our way back to those forces of our Central European culture from which emerged in earlier times what we call German idealism, which can also live in areas other than the artistic and intellectual fields. It is a mere prejudice to believe that practical men are those who, coming from ancient times, had too short thoughts for economic life, so that this economic life of modern times is sailing towards destruction. Those who are ridiculed today as impractical idealists will be seen in the future as true practical men. For public affairs, people will turn to those who have developed these forces, to the forces that Lessing, Goethe and Schiller have brought forth in us. But then one will work out of these healthy forces of Central Europe into the development of the future of humanity in such a way that the threefold social organism will stand on its three healthy foundations, which can be characterized by the fact that in the future the spirit must live in freedom, in free development; that everything that makes each person equal to every other person must live in democratic equality; that legal life must live in the sun of this democratic equality; that economic life, regulated associatively and managed factually in a federative way, must live under the principle of fraternity. Only then will the future of humanity flourish in Central Europe. This Central Europe should radiate something that can be a model for East and West. It should radiate from Central Europe what will benefit humanity in the future. So what should happen will have to happen from this Central Europe, and we will have to say of this event:

Freedom for the mind,

Equality for the law,

Brotherhood for economic life!

Discussion [not reported]

Closing words

Dear attendees,
I must say that I have the greatest respect for the first speaker in this discussion in terms of his very beautiful social will, but that I nevertheless – since I have something to say about what he presented today – I must find it disturbing that he, too, has brought up something that I consider a very unfortunate sign of our time. Please do not be offended, esteemed attendees, if I express this openly and honestly, even to a valued discussion partner. I had to discuss what Dr. Einstein said, let's say, in the 1880s, for example with [Adler and Pernerstorfer] or similar people. These things, which Dr. Einstein has again brought up today, are, so to speak, only the typical phrases of what has developed as a social-democratic party order for more than half a century in the civilized world, but especially in Central Europe. We know this very well. And precisely when one knows it very well, perhaps even knows it somewhat differently than Dr. Einstein, then in the present time one is faced with an enormous problem, to which I have, as best as possible in the brevity of a lecture that was already too long, pointed out something.

What is presented as a social-democratic program was suitable – I said in the lecture that when it comes to such things, which are, so to speak, great cultural-educational means, it does not matter so much whether one can discuss them, whether one can prove or disprove them, but rather how they work in terms of education. And in what was the Social Democratic program, what, in a sense, Dr. Einstein listed in his summary, that is such an educational tool. And I am familiar with all the various currents, the individual perceptions and thoughts that have found their way into the hearts and souls of the proletarians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in this way. Above all, however, we must not forget how this program has led to the establishment, within our modern economic and political life, of the notion, let us say, of the self-development of this economic and political life. It was so easily imagined: that which emerged as capitalism became private capitalism, it will concentrate more and more into large capital holdings, and then the transformation of capitalist society into a socialist one will happen by itself.

Today, we still see talk of positive impulses, of germinal thoughts leading to action, and this self-development is held up to us. It is intimately connected with what Dr. Einstein regards as the correct socialist program. But the whole situation with regard to what has just been mentioned has become somewhat different for the truly unbiased observer of current world events due to the world war catastrophe. Today we are not dealing with a self-perpetuating economic or political development; we are dealing with the fact that old cultural currents - as I expressed it in the lecture - have led themselves into self-dissolution. Today we are not dealing with some program, but with the fact that people are faced with a collapsing economic order and have to rebuild it.

Today we are faced with the proletarian human being with his subjective demands and subjective impulses. It is therefore necessary not to get stuck in general phrases, such as “socialization of the means of production”, but to show: how can we make the means of production function in a truly progressive way? And for me, the problem was to apply all these abstractions, including what Dr. Einstein said, to a concrete reality and to always ask: what can be done without dismantling, but by what is there, further develop it; not by ruining the cultural development, but by developing it in such a way that the legitimate demands, which I have also enumerated today in my lecture, can be satisfied for the broad masses. That was the task: not to stand still with the old socialist party programs, which are still floating around today like mummies of party officials, but to move forward in the spirit of the lessons that this world war catastrophe has taught us. That is what it is about, that the abstract, the non-realistic of social democracy must again be transformed into that which is conceived in terms of the three-part social organism that is being implemented today. It is a strange thing when some speaker appears who describes ideology and the fact that ideology has entered into the hearts and souls of people as desolate for the soul, when a speaker who sees in ideology a harmful legacy of the proletariat on the part of the former ruling circles, then a speaker who says: This speaker only wants a new ideology. That means falling back into old dogmatics; it means not wanting to go along with what honestly endeavors to bring the old into a truly contemporary form. That today it is being said again that the old remedy at the beginning, if not at the end, is a transfer of the means of production into the ownership of the totality, on the other hand, it must always be objected: What is this totality? I have explained to you in concrete terms how this transfer to the service of the whole comes about through the circulation of the means of production. It is an empty concept that never contains a germ of action if one only talks about transferring the means of production to the service of the whole. Because how this whole can function with the means of production is what matters. This is something that anyone who does not remain mired in the old dogmas will recognize. They will not want to impose a new ideology here; rather, they will see how an attempt is being made here to finally implement honest and well-intentioned abstractions in realistic thoughts and realistic social will.

I see in those who do not want to develop under the impression of our difficult, distressing and painful times, but who only want to remain with the old dogmas, I see in them - without wanting to offend anyone personally, least of all Dr. Einstein, of course - a terribly conservative mind. And I am glad that at least there are people today, especially in the proletariat, who go beyond these conservative leaders and demand that we look beyond the heads of the leaders for what can finally lead to the goals. If, like Du Bois-Reymond, you proclaim your 'ignorabimus' in the face of the limitations of nature, proclaiming an ignorabimus against this threefold social organism; or if you say, 'We cannot wait', then you are actually saying that you are substituting a nothing for that which, of course, cannot be exhaustively characterized in a short lecture. But today it is necessary not to get stuck in empty abstractions, not to just keep talking: because the pressure gauge is at 95, we need the revolution. But what is the revolution, after all, if we don't think about what we actually want to achieve through a revolution? If people only ever talk about conquering the machines, then the question must be asked: What do they do with these machines when they have them? That is the question. We have often had the example in the development of mankind that people who had machines did not know what to do with them. Should the demand for machines be sought from the vague abstractions, and then it be experienced that one does not know what to do with them?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have had to explain this to you, especially in connection with a point of view that I appreciate, like that of the person who spoke about it in the usual way. I have been accustomed to this since the 1980s, and what I have learned from it for myself has been incorporated into what I advocate today as the threefold social order.

To those who have objected that we cannot wait, I would simply refer them to my book “Key Points of the Social Question”, in which I explain in detail how what I have outlined today can be put into practice. then he will no longer say that we have to wait so and so many years, but he will say: we can bring about development in such a direction, as envisaged by the threefold social order, from today to tomorrow, from every point of spiritual, economic and political life. We just have to move in that direction, and the rest will follow. But we need courage for that. It takes less courage to keep talking about how the revolution must come, that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be striven for, and so on, than to really get to work on the details. Because this courage includes overcoming old habits of thinking.

My dear audience, when you go into more detail about what the threefold social order is, you will no longer say: practical work should be done and not lectures given forever! Practical work has been indicated piece by piece in the very will of the threefold social order.

And when it is said: we need other people, yes, then one does not know what relationship exists between the social in which the human being lives and between what the human being does. You see, the other day a magazine that also calls itself a social one wrote that socialization should not be rushed because people are not yet mature today. When I hear or read something like that, I always think that those who talk like that are not mature themselves. Because if we had those people who were now fully mature in this sense, then we would no longer need socialization, then people would truly live freely and equally and fraternally. Then we would not have the whole social question. The issue at hand is something else. I would like to mention a fact that occurred in a certain area. During the so-called war economy, it was necessary to employ merchants in the bureaucracy, for example, because they were specialists. The merchants still differed considerably from the bureaucrats when they were outside. But a strange fact occurred: after a few months, these merchants were more bureaucratic than the bureaucrats. Thus the environment had rubbed off on them. This will happen if you do not give each individual link in the social organism the character I have mentioned today. Then a social minority will be created in which people who used to be quite different can develop further in the sense of human ennoblement. I would like to know how one could think of social ideals if one were always to move in the circle: We need other people to achieve other conditions. If we keep going round in circles, we will never be able to achieve other conditions. The point is to create the conditions under which people can develop ethically and spiritually! This is another feature of threefolding: it does not go round in circles but goes straight for the facts; it aims to intervene directly in reality.

If someone says that I should have said this ten to fifteen years ago, when it would have been new, then I would reply that it is no different today than it was ten years ago. But how do you know that what I am saying today, perhaps less clearly formulated, I did not say ten to fifteen years ago? I would like to tell you something about that. I have already mentioned that I was a teacher for many years at the Workers' Education School founded by Liebknecht. There I tried in particular to show people how the materialistically oriented teaching only abstracts from the historical development of the last three to four centuries. At that time – that is, at the beginning of the present century – I had a fairly large number of students. When I had few students, the party bigwigs paid little attention to what I said to the people. When the number of students grew and grew, these party bigwigs became unpleasantly aware of what was being taught in a central workers' education school. As a result, a large number of students were called together one day and some party leaders were sent to the people. I said at the time: You want to be a party of the future, you want to establish future conditions. I would now like to know where freedom of teaching is to prevail today if you always want to suppress it, if you want to teach party dogmatism here. One of these leaders stood up and said, in contradiction to his entire group of hundreds of students: We cannot tolerate freedom of teaching; we know of no freedom in this area, we only know reasonable constraint. That is the [experience] I had at the time. It showed me that one must continue to work first, but that one must wait until one can meet with understanding. That is why I must also refuse today when it is said: You don't need a new party! You certainly don't need one. I really don't know where it could be inferred from the lecture that I want a new party. I have spent my whole life studying the various social conditions in all circles and all walks of life. But I have never been involved in parties. And I am glad of that. And do you think that now, at the end of my sixth decade, I would like to put myself in the shoes of a party, after saying what the parties have actually achieved and where they have brought our political life? I appeal to the intellect and reason of each individual and not to parties; I always have to say that when I am told that what I am saying is difficult to understand. I know it is taken from reality. And that which is taken from reality requires a certain instinct for its realizability. This certain instinct for realizability cannot be absorbed from abstract party-line opinions. But we should also learn from the past. Unfortunately, we have experienced it enough in Central Europe that people have accepted what they have been ordered to accept from any side, for more than four and a half years. We have experienced it: if only from the great headquarters or from somewhere else the opinions that one truly could not understand well with one's own reason, if one could repeat them, then one saw them. You didn't ask yourself: should this be understood or not? You took orders to understand. Now it is a matter of understanding something that you are not ordered to understand, but to understand out of the freedom of the human soul. And only this appeal to the direct freedom of the human soul leads us forward. I am not thinking of a party, but I am thinking of all those people who today, out of necessity and misery, want to save themselves – a reasonable judgment of common sense: they will not flock to a party. But perhaps they will be the bearers of what we need for the future, what we must strive for if we want to emerge from confusion and chaos.

I do not want to give a program for solving the social question, but rather speak about observations of life.

It is said that never in the history of mankind have people experienced such terrible things as in this war: but then, to be consistent, one would also have to add: it takes a very special idea to find a solution to today's task. What is given, what people have to absorb, must be completely different now than it has been so far. The Communist Manifesto is not just a theoretical question, but a question of world history, one must understand that. What is called the social question lies deep, deep down in the development of humanity, only one must grasp it.

Thermometer – an indicator of the temperature of a room.

What consciously comes to the surface, the demands, are not the real thing at all. Everything that flares up in the Communist Manifesto of all countries is a historically necessary thing: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” It is not an idea that is being appealed to, but the impulses that arise from a certain life situation, precisely because one is a proletarian, the vague demands that arise from proletarian life, something un-ideological, a force arises. The proletarians do not want ideology, they do not want any ideas. But what comes from the bourgeoisie is and will be built upon. One speaks as if the proletarian programs were something new, but that is not the case. They have been adopted from the bourgeoisie. This will only be recognized later. A gap has opened up between the leading forces and the proletariat. But this is not the case; only the class differences are there; the proletarian world has learned a great deal from the leading circles. But when it saw that their science could not bring it salvation, it lost faith in that science and in those circles. The proletariat recognized the ideology of the intellectual life.

The earlier worldview still had a very different impact; it was still connected to the spiritual world. Today's worldview has no impact; the working of spiritual power is absent. This worldview does not fill people. It is a matter of the head, while the other is a matter of the heart. This difference is expressed in the Protestant confession: understanding everything that the world around us offers with the mind; for the other, faith must suffice. In the bourgeoisie there is still a remnant of the earlier worldview, a kind of connection with the spiritual world. The proletarian is placed in the factory, at the machine. Nothing passes into him, as it did, for example, in the old crafts, when the soul spoke out of the old door handles, for example, and so on. Cut off from any connection that the old craft still had, what spoke out of things and events.

“What am I in the world?” - “I am a highly developed animal organism.” This is the proletariat's perception of what he [the proletarian] has adopted from science. You can be inspired by such ideas, but you can't live with them in the long run. The intellect is convinced that this does not come from the spiritual, but the soul revolts against it. And this is what underlies all social questions. That is the real face. It is thought that everything that lives as art, as science, as custom, law and so on, is ideology, smoke. With such a view, one can think - one cannot live with it.

It is also connected with the fact that economic life has been absorbed by the state in recent centuries.

The municipal administrations have been absorbed and united with the interests of the princes. Intellectual life flows into this state structure. It was bound to happen that the school was wrested from the church and handed over to the state. The state has absorbed the church's “trailing resentment” with regard to schools. The demand for socialism and democracy must lead to the call for the liberation of intellectual life from the state.

Should the dependence of schools and education on the state be further increased? Intellectual life is now being crushed in Russia.

Every person who has come of age should be free to decide on the organization of everything that a person who has come of age has to decide on. In the spiritual life, only those who are knowledgeable and competent in this spiritual life should have a say. Only those who are active in the spiritual life, from the lowest teacher to the highest teacher at the university, should have a say. He must have sufficient time to be able to share in the administration of this life alongside his work in education. Not as it is today, when people who are not practically involved in the profession determine what has to happen.

Then we will have true democracy in the legal life and knowledgeable, efficient leadership in spiritual life.

But the decisions that are made in economic life can only come from knowledgeable and competent and capable individuals or groups of people. It is difficult to form appropriate judgments. The current economic structure of the state is a product of historical development. That is very true. Marx's friend, Engels, explained this very well in his book.

Where expert and professional judgment is needed, the majority cannot decide. One-sided economic thinking cannot lead to a solution of the social question.

In order to properly initiate the transformation of the credit system, it is also necessary that knowledgeable and competent personalities are active. Confidence in persons or groups of persons is creditworthiness.

Not three parliaments, but only one for political life. In the intellectual and economic fields, not the majority, but knowledgeable and competent personalities who lead and guide.

Centralized administration is nothing but the product of politically mature thinking. Economic life will not be depoliticized if it is merely separated from the political parliament and centrally administered alongside it with politically mature thinking. Rather, this administration must be carried out quite differently, as envisaged in the threefold order.

Production should not be for profit, but rather for consumption. The motive for production should not be the entrepreneur's profit, but rather what the people need.

Is there anything underlying this essentially correct demand that can lead us to a proper solution of the social question?

The abolition of the prevailing wage system and the right to vote for all those with equal rights – these are in fact demands that had been raised up to the Eisenach Program. Then came the Erfurt Program: nothing more of these two demands, but something quite different: the abolition of all private property and the transfer of all property, of all means of production, into state administration. The old social order had its good support in throne and altar. But now it no longer has that. Instead, it has the office and the factory, and we no longer have that “good support” from them. Overall accounting instead of church administration, nationalization and so on. This is already being done in the East, and what is being done and what is going on there is terrible. This is the grave of the entire modern civilization. One does not notice this immediately, because there are still spiritual and political forces from the past in the circumstances.

Hypnosis of the spirited Lenin.

Spiritualism of [blank in transcript] Trotsky.

Capital: sum of the means of production and land.

The developmental leap of all humanity in the fifteenth century, as in the individual human life in the sixth [to] seventh and thirteenth [to] fourteenth years. And this developmental leap boils down to the fact that man wants to be seen as a personality - each individual.

And this now leaps out in the social question. In the past, the patriarchal relationship, now industry. What about the means of production now? In the past, land was in the hands of a few people, and others worked on this land, which created a special relationship. Today, the means of production have to be procured with large sums of money and are managed by these owners. But these managers have failed to change the relationship with the workers. If there is damage somewhere, statistics are kept. But ideas for change are not found. People were without ideas. The time must come when ideas may again guide the facts. Today, people who have such ideas are branded as utopians, idealists, impractical people.

Talking about abolishing private property is nothing more than childish. Individual initiative is not anti-social, but social. Capital should be centralized by those who have the ability to do so in the right way through their own initiative. In the intellectual field, ownership passes to those who can best manage it for the general public thirty years after the owner's death. People still look perplexed today when this principle is applied to the economy.

In the Platonic teaching, defense and nurturing classes, we have the exact opposite of what must now be striven for with the threefold social order. A wall is erected in that order, between the classes. In the threefold order, it is precisely the class distinction that will be overcome. That which is outside of the human being is threefolded, while everyone can belong to any of these three realms. Do not approach humanity with abstract programs - works councils and so on - but let knowledgeable people speak from reality. That is the essential thing.

If you were to bring together about 800 such works councils, there would only be 25 to 30 who would really achieve something and have something good to show for it. It will be a great piece of work to achieve something out of today's chaos. But if there is not only debate and parliamentarization, but real work, then what these 25 to 30 can say will be understood by the other 700 to 800. The understanding is already there in the masses.

An economic community must have a very specific size. If it is too large, it becomes too inefficient; if it is too small, it cannot achieve the right level of success. The right size is somewhere in between. This must first be understood and recognized. Rathenau, on the one hand, was highly ingenious, but on the other hand, he was bound by the old, outdated ideas and concepts that must first be overcome today.

The economy does not need laws, but contracts. As soon as a product becomes too expensive, too few people work on it – if it becomes too cheap, too many work on it. If an article becomes too expensive, it shows that the particular article is not produced enough; so it must be contractually ensured that more people turn to this article. If an article becomes too cheap, too much of it is produced, then a factory may have to be closed down. Difficult! It is certainly difficult. If someone just wants to say that it is difficult and not intervene, then they do not want to ensure right relationships. Economic life should be regulated through associations, not through the chance of the market. A federal structure, not a centralized administration, must ensure proper production and circulation.

The impulse for threefolding does not claim to be wiser than other ideas, but it does assume that the wise will be called upon. That is what matters. The language of facts must be spoken. Only very deaf ears have been cultivated against the language of facts. Economic life must be fed from the spiritual life. Only from a self-governing spiritual life can the right things flow into life in all areas. A freely administered spiritual life never releases dreamers; you can never be a real philosopher if you can't chop wood when the time comes, that is, be a whole man.

Merging of blood heritage... [gap in transcript] and educational results,... [gap in transcript] and yet spiritual unity. This is how it is in a threefold state. The spiritual permeates all life, does not remain outside. It cannot be socialized in the sense of a [planned economy] or the like, but conditions can be created in which people can work socially. That is what matters. People must have the opportunity to be social, education must be such that they become social. Realistic ideas must have taken root in a sufficient number of souls.

That is the “how” of this impulse for the threefold social organism.

Roman Boos: Before Dr. Steiner's lecture on the problems of threefolding, I would just like to make the announcement that there will be an opportunity to ask questions after the lecture. I would kindly ask you to make use of this opportunity and ask any questions that arise in relation to these problems of threefolding.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It is not out of any personal or social arbitrariness that from this Goetheanum, or rather from the spiritual movement, of which this Goetheanum is to be the representative, a stimulus is also going out in the newer time with regard to the social question of the present and the near future. It is an inner necessity that, out of the seriousness with which the spiritual affairs of humanity are to be treated here, suggestions must also flow about the most important, that is, the social problems of the present and the immediate future of humanity.

Now, the suggestions that come from here have often been misunderstood in the strangest way. And by pointing out some of the principles of the social question that arise from here, I would like to take this opportunity to clear up misunderstandings either immediately in the discussions or afterwards, by linking them to questions.

When we look at the social question today, it is basically a misunderstanding that is actually quite old. The fact is that this social question was not seen in its true form during the period when it first began to arise most vehemently and when it developed most intensively. It only really emerged in its true form after the terrible war catastrophe of recent years, or perhaps during it. Before that, people had basically come to terms with it, talking about the social question from a wide range of party standpoints, or from one or other understanding – but mostly very limited understandings – that had been developed for this question, trying out this or that means of providing information, this or that institution, which were supposed to provide a remedy for one or other of the ills that arose in the course of the social movement. But a real, in-depth understanding of what is actually at stake in what we call the social question has not emerged in recent decades; it has not emerged since the middle of the nineteenth century, when it should have emerged. Today it turns out that this social question cannot be tackled without considering it as a human question, as a question of the life of our entire social existence within European and American civilization. And as long as we do not find a way to understand this [social] question as a human question, we will not arrive at views or institutions that can be of any significant help in finding a solution to this question that is as humane as possible.

There has been a lot of talk about the social question for a long time, and it must be said that at present people do not really have any idea of how this question has been in people's minds in the last decades of the nineteenth century, or how it has affected people's lives. It is the case that today people think relatively briefly, that they only see what is immediately in front of them, and that they are not given the opportunity to see larger connections. One does not, my dear audience, come to an understanding of this social question without seeing the larger context.

Now, the deficiency that is being pointed out here is actually present in all our current education. It is also present in the way in which our current education has taken hold of people from the most diverse social classes through the particular development of the civilized world in the second half of the nineteenth century. Spiritual science, as it is to proceed from this building here in Dornach, is not meant to be merely an uplifting of the human soul to spiritual worlds, nor is it meant to be merely the bringing of knowledge related to the spiritual world. Rather, it is meant to permeate all human activity with the fruits that can be obtained from this spiritual science. And now, in public lectures, I have emphasized for two decades that the most important thing in this spiritual science is not what one absorbs in terms of content – it is important, but it is not the most important thing, it is, so to speak, the precondition, but it is not the thing to stop at. It is not the most important thing to absorb the knowledge that the human being consists of these and those physical and spiritual elements, and that, from a spiritual point of view, human life proceeds in such and such a way. Rather, the most important thing is to progress from this spiritual-scientific foundation of human knowledge to something very much alive. That is how one must think of this progress. If one hears about the insights of spiritual science, if one reads about it – one can already read a lot about this spiritual science in numerous works of an authoritative literature – if one reads and hears about what it presents, one is forced to think quite differently from what one has been accustomed to thinking in the last three to four centuries. Everyone must feel that: If you want to understand what is offered here as spiritual science, you have to acquire different ideas, different concepts, from those that have been common today and for some time. But by acquiring these other thoughts, these other concepts, our thinking first becomes much more agile. Because the immobility of thinking is a hallmark of newer education. Thinking becomes much more agile. In order to even begin to grasp the larger contexts presented by anthroposophy, one must absorb more comprehensive concepts and, above all, concepts that do not get stuck in the details. So, to a certain extent, one first trains one's thinking to take in larger life scales. One also makes one's thinking more agile.

That this is so is actually corroborated by an external circumstance, ladies and gentlemen. You can hear time and again, when public anthroposophical lectures are given and the illustrious gentlemen of journalism deign to write something about them, you can always hear again: “In the hall there was mainly a female audience” — whereby the esteemed ladies present are not always paid compliments with regard to their spiritual and other constitutions. But in a sense it is not always untrue that the audience at such lectures is mainly an “audience of women”. But perhaps there is another side to this than is usually meant when this is raised as an accusation against the spiritual science movement; perhaps one could also say what I have often said in response to this statement, which is meant as an accusation: Yes, why are the men not there? They could come just as easily as the ladies, and perhaps it is not exactly because of the humanities that these men are not there, because after all - as you will admit, you usually cannot talk to those who are not there!

Now there is also an inner reason for this, and here I must ask you to really take what I have to say sine ira and without emotion. I am never pleased that – forgive me – the majority of the audience usually consists of ladies. I would very much like it – the ladies may not see this as any kind of allusion to anything – I would very much like it if, so to speak, every lady could have her gentleman at the lecture. But that is not the case, and it is not just an external reason, but there are deeper reasons.

You see, our entire modern education is basically a male education. How long has it been since women were able to participate in a certain way in what the educational means of modern times have to offer? Our entire civilization is more or less a male civilization. This was something I was confronted with very strongly in all the discussions in which I, for example, had to confront people like Gabriele Reuter with the fact that, yes, the women's movement can basically only have any significant impact on the entire social life of modern times if women do not simply enter into what is, after all, only a male education in our time. What would ultimately be the result if women all put on tails, trousers and top hats? They would just be going along with the men's tastelessness. But basically the same thing has happened in the intellectual sphere! Women have not brought what was in them into modern life, but have conformed, they have donned the intellectual trousers, that is, they have become the same kind of doctors as men have become , they have become lawyers or philologists just as men have become lawyers or philologists, and they are now even striving to become theologians just as men have become theologians – they have simply put on the intellectual trousers. It is the case that one must say: the women's movement will only become something when women contribute their special element – I do not mean the feminine at all now, but the special element – to our intellectual civilization, which comes from the fact that – well, I will express myself drastically, although it not always meant to be so drastic — that their brains are not constricted in Spanish boots, which come from the various faculties of the present day as well; for men's brains have been trained in these Spanish boots for centuries. They have become those thoughts that cannot overlook any great connections, that are above all immobile, rigid, and that can only view something like spiritual science, because it demands longer thoughts, as something fantastic. Thus women, protected by their naivety, come to the anthroposophical lectures through the fact that the false boot element of male education has not yet entered their brains. They come because, if I may express myself figuratively, their brains have remained even softer. It can still absorb more than the male brain. This is also a deeper reason. So I do not want to compliment the ladies that they have the better brain; they just have the one that is less deformed. I do not want to pay the ladies a compliment either, that they understand anthroposophy better because they are ladies, but only that they understand it better because they judge from the heart and have learned less of what one has been accustomed to learning in the last four centuries.

Spiritual science consciously opposes the education of the last four centuries and simply demands more comprehensive thoughts, which initially also make the imagination more agile, but from the imagination they make the whole person more agile. So it can be said that someone who has undergone training in spiritual science will more easily see through a reality, including its economic context, than someone who has only emerged from the education of the last few centuries.

I have already pointed out how little this education of the last few centuries was suited to looking at the essentials of the matter. I have pointed out how, in a certain period of the nineteenth century, the gold standard was introduced in place of the previous bimetallism. Those who advocated the gold standard claimed everywhere – you can read about it in the most diverse parliamentary reports – that free trade would be established through the gold standard. The customs barriers of the various countries would fall. Well, there is no doubt that if these tariff barriers had fallen, we would be in a different position today. But not only have the tariff barriers not fallen, anyone crossing borders today knows that many other barriers have been erected. None of the predictions of learned economists and practitioners of life have come true as a result of the gold standard, of monometallism. None of it has materialized; everywhere the opposite has happened: customs barriers have been erected. That means that the esteemed practitioners in all areas of life have been thoroughly mistaken; they have not foreseen anything of how reality works. What has come to light on a large scale – in business life – has come to light on a small scale everywhere and is still coming to light everywhere. What is meant by an overview of circumstances has not been taught to people. What could be learned in the highest schools did not result in an education of the human soul for an overview of the larger contexts of practical life.

But please do not think that I consider all the practitioners or the learned economists who have stated what I have just indicated to be fools. On the contrary, I find that the people who spoke in the European parliaments and wrote in the European newspapers, especially in the 1960s and 1950s, were very clever people. Very clever people predicted the wrong things, because you couldn't predict anything right under the circumstances that existed. Because, my dear attendees, cleverness doesn't help you if you can't gain life experience through that cleverness. And the conditions as they were in industrialism, in commercialism, they just offered only the possibility to see the next; they did not offer the possibility to also tie the most clever thoughts to that which lives in reality. One had become accustomed to seeing through the microscope in science, to magnifying the smallest, so that one would not have to judge something larger. This has trained people to see the smallest relationships. This is only a comparison, an analogy, but the analogy is valid.

Spiritual science, therefore, does not want to consider as important that which can be learned as content, but it wants to consider as most important the education that a person acquires through the thoughts that he must make if he wants to understand spiritual science. And that is why there is an inner necessity for this spiritual science to be applied today in the practical areas of life, because it aims to develop the kind of education that enables people to look clearly and without illusion at the practical areas of life.

And so we can say: because people were not able to look at the social question from such a broader perspective, they have not really seen it for what it is. Today, after the catastrophe of the war, we can actually see: all the discussions that have been held, all the fine theories that have been put forward, they are actually for nothing, they basically lead nowhere; because it is not at all about the wickedness of institutions; it is not at all about that, not in the big picture, of course it is in the details, but not to the extent that the illusionary theories of socialists and anti-socialists would have us believe. We are not dealing with something remotely similar to the antagonism between capital and labor – on which entire broad theories are built. No, we are dealing with something completely different. We are dealing with the fact that feelings and urges have grown in broad masses of the population of civilized humanity that have been ignored for decades and that should be understood. One should humanly understand what is surging up. One should ask oneself: What are the natures of the people who today demand revolution or something else, who today aspire to political power or the like? How did this come about in these human souls? One should look at what is a social question as a human question, then one could gain ideas about how to deal with what is before us. Again and again, the question was not: What are the souls of the broad masses of the proletariat made of? Rather, the question was: What are the living conditions of the broad masses of the proletariat, since the proletarians themselves, under the influence of bourgeois education, formed only concepts that had actually been trained in the economic science of the bourgeoisie. We do not have anything at all in today's general world education that realistically captures the social situation.

It can be said, ladies and gentlemen: The thing that weighs most heavily on the heart of anyone who is truly concerned about the social question today is that so few want to see clearly and distinctly the guilt that the leading circles have incurred in modern times, a real guilt, truly not so much in the sphere of external economic life as in the sphere of educational life, in the sphere of intellectual life. We have seen a whole new class emerge in the last few centuries. We have had this new class alongside us; we have seen how this new class has a completely new language for soul development that we have not looked at. We have continued to speak the old language of tradition in the educational life of the leading circles. No effort was made to bridge the gap between the leading classes and the classes that emerged in the proletariat. No real interest was paid to what was emerging in humanity as a human question. At most, institutions and facilities were set up to provide for the broad masses in the sense of the old-oriented charity, to provide for stomachs, clothing and housing, and so on. But no thought was given to the fact that it had become necessary to achieve a world view in which all people of the modern age could come together in understanding. Today we have the fruits. You read today in the newspapers of the proletariat, full of omissions about everything that has come from the leading, from the formerly leading classes. They read that actually all the thinking about capitalism in earlier times, you read that all that is useless, that a completely different spirit must come, the spirit of the great masses, the spirit that rises out of the great masses like smoke out of a chimney. The most abominable abstraction has become the idol of the broad masses of the proletariat; an indefinite spirit that is supposed to arise from the totality.

Two questions can be asked; one that must be answered from a deeper understanding of history, which says again and again that the spirit, if it is to work in life, must go through personalities, that a spirit never flies around without working through personalities. But the other question - it can be asked very specifically today. First, a practical realization of what can be meant in social terms has gone out from Dornach and from our friends in Stuttgart.

You know that our friends Molt, Unger, Kühn, Leinhas and others have joined forces in Stuttgart to translate into practical life what can come from Dornach in social terms. We then – I will of course omit the details – we then began to work in about April 1919. Of course, such work – where one is not dealing with wax figures but with the living humanity of the present – can only be done step by step, with exact consideration of the real conditions. And it may be said that, in particular, in the first 14 days of our work at that time, everything actually went quite well. To a certain extent, what had to be achieved was achieved: winning broader sections of the proletariat over to reasonable social ideas. If something else had been achieved at the time, namely to win broader circles of the bourgeoisie, the leading class, for these ideas, namely to win over those who were then leading, then something that could have been fruitful would certainly have happened. But the broader circles of the bourgeoisie basically failed at first because they did not know that they were dealing with a human issue. At the time, I said to many people in Stuttgart who could have been in a position to understand such things: Yes, you see, the fact that you and I are talking about social theories can certainly have a good theoretical and later also a practical value, but that is not what matters now. What matters is that we can do something, that we can bring together people who can really do something together. To do that, it is necessary, for example, to speak to the workers in a way that they can understand, so that you first have the workers. I even said: if you don't like some of the things that have to be said in the language of the proletariat to the proletariat, it doesn't matter at first, but what matters is that you bring people together. Just have the patience to bring people together.

There was really very little understanding of the fact that the modern social question is a human question. And so it could happen that one day the so-called leaders of the proletariat noticed – it is always the worst when the leaders of any party or class or religious community notice that followers are being acquired among their flock; that is always the most dangerous thing, actually. They are not very interested in things if you talk cabbage and don't win any followers. But when people realized: Yes, something is happening here, they appeared on the scene, and it soon became clear that through all the foolish warming up of old socialist theories and Marxism that could be done, it was done, people were persuaded that one did not mean well by them, but that one was also something of a disguised capitalist or at least a capitalist servant. In short, a few leading personalities appeared on the scene, and the masses quickly evaporated. This is something that teaches in a very concrete sense that the spirit is not something that comes out of the masses and flies around, but by showing us that the Stuttgart workers are more Catholic in their method of obeying than have ever been Roman Catholics, one could see that all this is a fuss, a phrase about the “spirit” that comes “from the masses,” that even today the masses, as they have always done, follow a few bellwethers. Not only does history teach this, but experience also teaches it. Because it would have been [therefore] a matter of undermining the ground - I say it quite sincerely - undermining the ground of the leaders. Until one admits to oneself that nothing can get better if the leaders do not get away from this leadership of the broad masses, who have emerged from the circumstances of the last decades, things will not get better. That is the crux of the matter. Therefore, one had to – and in this respect we too have made mistakes – one had to approach the masses directly, leaving out everything that the leaders did. It is a question of humanity, and it has basically arisen as a question of humanity, and it has been noticed here and there: it is not a matter of achieving individual institutions, but of achieving a world view and conception of life through which a bridge can be created between the people who emerged as the leading class from the old world order and those who are digging so wildly in the proletariat. But that is the strangest thing: those people who have seen something have always been like preachers in the wilderness. One can indeed make the strangest experiences through appropriate retrospectives.

When I wrote my first appeal, which was then published as an appendix to my “Key Points of the Social Question” and which so many people signed, some people were furious about it because I pointed out how the last decades, especially in Germany, were not at all suitable for setting and solving realistic tasks; and even today I still receive angry letters from “well-meaning” people about this first appeal. And yet, these people are all unaware of the facts. Facts are only reflected in something like the following.

V[iktor] Alim&] Huber wrote the following in a magazine in 1869 – I ask you to take note of the year, I choose this year and this quote quite deliberately because what was written here predates the reestablishment of the German Reich – Huber wrote the following in a magazine published in Stuttgart in 1869, for example, by first pointing out how the labor question arose , how the social question shines in through the windows; after he has explained how one should try, as he calls it, to create some alleviation of the contradictions that are bound to arise through the “corporation route”, through the route of appropriate union; after he – in 1869, my esteemed audience – after he has said: If the spirit that has been developed so far in view of the social question is further developed, the time will come when the military state will reveal this question in a terrible way as “to be or not to be”. These words appeared in a Stuttgart newspaper in 1869! I would like to know how many people have thought about this, now or after the so-called German revolution, where the words “to be or not to be” were used again and again, how many people have considered that a somewhat more clairvoyant person had already written this in 1869, at a time when people were confronted with completely different facts than they are today. The man wrote, after he had dealt with such things:

Here, too, we are ultimately referred to a reform, strengthening and multiplication of all institutions and means of social education of the people at all, but here in particular at the higher levels, as an indispensable condition of social reforms.

The man realized that it is a matter of spreading a particular intellectual life, which, however, did not yet exist at the time. But an understanding of intellectual life could have grown out of such foundations if people had listened to such people at all in the frenzy of the following decades. And this man spoke even more precisely in 1869:

It goes without saying that this cannot be the case without a fundamental change in the spirit of our universities, and all the more so the less one

— namely at the universities —

have any inkling or even understanding of this need and this profession.

Now, my dear attendees, while the man said in 1869: It must begin at the universities, something else must be introduced into the lecture halls, because it is far removed from the spirit must take hold in humanity if improvement is to occur –; while the man said this in 1869, today the people who “mean well” come and say: So we are founding adult education centers! That is to say, we take what has been concocted at the universities, cook it in somewhat more favorable preparations that it may benefit the masses, and administer the same stuff in smaller doses. What does that really mean? What it really means is that what was no good when the leading classes did it, now carried into the broad masses, should be good. The issue is not that we carry what has been taught further into the broad masses, but that we replace what has been taught and has brought us into the catastrophe with what is emphasized here, what is taken as a starting point here: we must first find the kind of spiritual culture that leads to the adult education center. We will not find this if we do not make an effort to find our way out of materialistic science and into spiritual science. What comes from the old science is what the leaders of the proletarians have learned, what the Trotskys, Lenins and so on have learned. This has led to what these people preach to the proletarians, what they set up. That, that is sufficiently widespread. That is the kind of thing you can't do anything with. What we need is what comes from spiritual science. It is not something that tells people, for example in the social sphere: let us set it up like this and like that, militarize work, and then a paradise will arise on earth! You will not find such a sentence in the 'Key Points of the Social Question'. In the 'Key Points of the Social Question' you will find this as a starting point: We want to have a possible social and viable social organism, that is, we do not want an earthly paradise, such a thing is perhaps quite impossible. It is not at all a question of whether one should strive for this or that, because of course people strive for something higher when they are offered something; because what one has once striven for as the highest is immediately the lowest in the next moment. What is important is not to promise people heaven on earth, but to study how the social organism becomes viable, how it can best be brought to life. Then it may turn out that not all of people's wishes can be fulfilled, but an especially ingenious person might say – I have known such people, I have met many a freeloader in my long life – it might occur to people, for example, could occur to people to say: It is a highly inappropriate arrangement that beings move on two legs, it could all be arranged differently; this physical human organism, there is so much that is inappropriate, and so on, and so on. There could well be specially designed heads that could imagine the human organism very differently from how it is. Of course, the imagination would not be a realistic one. But there are people like that, I have met them. Of course, there are also people who promise others paradise on earth. But that is no proof that it is possible to realize what people promise and in which they find understanding, because, of course, you only have to promise people what they want and desire, then you will find understanding in broad circles more easily than if you only talk about what is possible, if you only talk about what the social question can really achieve. That is what the “key issues of the social question” are all about.

That is why, because only this can be spoken of, we have arrived at the threefold social organism, which seems utopian only to those who look at it superficially, because wherever you look at life, if you are not blinded by preconceived theories, you will see that the main structure of our present-day intellectual life, so-called intellectual life, has been built up and promoted by the fact that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state, certainly under the compulsion of confessional necessities – at the time when it happened – has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has has been promoted by the fact that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state, certainly under the compulsion of confessional necessities – at the time when it happened, it was a necessity, today we can go beyond it – that the unified state has shaped this intellectual life by taking over the schools. It educates its people as it needs them. It educates theologians as it needs them, it educates lawyers, doctors, as it needs them. Switzerland, for example, needs doctors who have only been educated in Switzerland, at Swiss faculties, because a doctor educated a few hours away cannot practice medicine in Switzerland; and it is the same with philologists, it is the same with everyone. The state, when it has control of education, must of course impose its point of view.

Now imagine, instead of such a state education, an education system that is completely self-governing, an education system that, from the lowest to the highest schools, has as administrators those who are actively involved in this spiritual — the teacher teaching only enough to have free some hours in which he can devote himself to the administration of the educational system; no one else is involved in this administration of the educational system except those who are actively involved. No corporate body has a say in it, no parliament; for what is to be said regarding the training for intellectual life requires specialized training and expertise, requires certain abilities and could only be trained if intellectual life stands on its own ground. As soon as something that arises from majority opinion or from the average view is decreed as law and then passes over into the administrative sphere, the sphere of spiritual education must wither away. And there is an inner connection between the materialistic type of our modern spiritual life and the nationalization of that spiritual life.

You see, you can experience special things there. People cannot always see immediately if they are not familiar with spiritual science, which shows itself through itself, through its entire being: what must be striven for through it can only be striven for in free spiritual life ; it can only be striven for if it comes solely from the personalities, if it is only as good and as bad as the personalities of an age can make it, if one does not succumb to the illusion that There are laws that prescribe how teaching should be done. What use are laws! It depends on the teachers, on the real, concrete teaching personalities; it depends on the people who are involved in teaching, in the spiritual realm, that they also manage this at the same time. If we were to hypothetically assume the sad case that in an age, in a generation, there were only stupid teachers, then this generation would have to be educated in a stupid way. That would still be better than having good laws for the teaching system, and these good laws being treated even worse than when stupidity springs from within the human being. In the spiritual sphere it is necessary that what happens should come out of the abilities of the human being, for in this way it will always be the best conceivable for a given age. That is what matters. That is why it is not immediately apparent that this freedom, this emancipation of spiritual life as one of the links in the social organism, is a necessity. It may happen that very well-meaning, very clever people raise the objection – it comes up again and again – let us say, for example, it is someone, I will say now, in State X – so as not to offend anyone – it is someone in State X, and they are told that it is necessary, the threefold social order, the freedom of spiritual life. He will perhaps say the following: Yes, in the other state Y, Z and so on, it is already as you say, but with us in X, there, there we notice nothing of the dependence of teaching on the government, on the state powers; with us, the education system is not disturbed by the state powers.

Yes, my dear attendees, I would like to say: That is precisely the problem, that people say so, because by saying so, they no longer realize how dependent they are. They are so dependent that their dependence appears to them as freedom. Only dependence goes through their heads. They approve of everything that is put into their heads, and because they obediently follow the state's orders as a matter of course, they do not feel in the least confused by them. They do not even realize what the matter is. That is perhaps the very worst of all, that especially in the intellectual field, but especially in the educational field, it has already come to such a pass that people no longer feel at all how they are dependent, that they glorify this dependence as freedom. Of course, if someone thinks like the pastor who had just preached a sermon and in which he explained that, according to the wisdom of the world, man is best built, a hunchback was waiting for him at the church exit and asked the pastor: “Yes, Reverend, can you tell me that I am also best built?” He replied: “For a hunchback, you are built very well indeed.” Yes, you see, when we speak of freedom of thought to people who perceive dependency as freedom, they tell us: “Yes, we have complete freedom!” That is the one link in the threefold social organism, the free spiritual life.

Just as little as spiritual life can tolerate the schematic classification of the democratic state, in the least because democracy can only lead to the manifestation of average opinions, and average opinions are most intolerable in the free development of intellectual life, just as little as intellectual life tolerates the schematic principle of the state, just as little does economic life. Economic life can only be based on real conditions, just as intellectual life can only be based on human abilities. Spiritual life must work in the way that is possible from the talents of the people of an age; economic life must work in such a way that it can develop fully in this economic life, with expertise, professional competence and involvement in a branch of economic life, so that others who have to do with this branch of the economy can have confidence in those who are involved in it. This means that economic life is only possible if it is built on associative lines, if it is built in such a way that what belongs together in economic life joins together, that economic circles - be they professional circles or circles that face each other, such as production circles, consumption circles, and so on - join together in such a way that they are associated.

Of course, not every circle can be associated in every circle; but it is possible for the whole economic life to be associated in an indirect way. But because the individual economic circles are associated with each other in this way [see blackboard drawing, p. 596], the person who is in any association stands [opposite another] and can gain from the circumstances he faces, through contracts or similar, what is necessary to have the basis for a proper economy. You can never organize economic life, but only associate it. You cannot organize how the individual professions should work and so on from a central location, as Lenin and Trotsky wanted to do, but you can only, by having the professional associations, try to bring them into such economic associations that one supports the other, that one gains trust for one's work from what one learns from the other.

To look at the circumstances realistically is so terribly far from the people of the present. Oh, what irony of facts we are experiencing in our time! We have seen, my dear ladies and gentlemen, that in certain states the blessing of militarism has been pronounced by parliaments, that no one but at most smaller parties has raised objections. It is decades behind us. We have seen, especially during this war, that those who have the least understanding of the situation have once again let loose their decrees out of anti-militarism!

It does not matter at all whether one was right or not, but rather that one knows why one can be right, that one knows the circumstances. And we have seen that today in socialist Germany, for example, a thunderstorm is brewing over militarism, and we see a man who now, in a legislative assembly, says, “Militarism has not only had dark sides, but militarism has brought great benefits to humanity. We have seen how those who went to war learned how to organize; and when they came back, we found that the people who had gone through the school of this war were the best people to organize work in the factories in a military sense. We have experienced that we have obtained a correct hierarchy of people through the training of this war, in that the people of this war have learned to work systematically and to subordinate themselves. We have come to understand the victory of the military order for social life.” – And just a few weeks ago, this man continued in this vein! Who was it? Trotsky in Moscow, justifying the militarization of Russian labor!

Yes, one would like to ask in the face of such things: Is there really no spark of alertness left in humanity today, when it does not look at this stark contradiction of life? Should life go on when these stark contradictions are part of this life? The point is really that, for example, in these 'key points of the social question', nothing else is striven for than that which can arise – it is clearly emphasized at one point in detail – which can arise precisely out of the present institutions. If the people who are involved in these current institutions only begin to set themselves the goal of what the meaning of threefolding is, then one can work in the spirit of threefolding everywhere, if one sets oneself the goal of threefolding, if you know that it can only be a matter of achieving, on the one hand, a free spiritual life, as I have characterized it, and, on the other hand, an economic life that works only out of economic necessities.

You see, it has even become possible to have people together in Stuttgart for a few weeks with whom one could talk about the next requirements of a non-state, free economic life. Not just once, but many times, I said to the people there: Those who will now be called upon to work on this free organization of economic life will soon, when the going gets tough, see that they cannot stop at socialist phrases, at Marxism and so on, but that they will have to work from the specific demands of economic life, and each in his own place; the plant manager, the labor manager, as well as the proletarian, they will have to work, each from his own place, from the point of view of economic life itself. This will bring to light completely different questions than those that are usually raised today, and especially those raised by practice. Just now, people were beginning to realize that, among many other things, it is necessary, for example, to figure out how a certain article in a certain economic area must have a very specific price, a very specific price range, and that the institutions must be set up in such a way that a certain price range is available. I showed people how to achieve these price ranges through arrangements, not through things like, for example, the monetary theorists with their statistics, with their state office, which is all utopian, but how to achieve it through the actual social structure, through what arises from the interaction of the associations. What is the practice today? Today it is practice that something becomes more expensive due to certain circumstances. More pay is demanded, or there is a strike. Because more pay is demanded, other things become more expensive, of course, and then more pay is demanded again. And so what is most important must be taken into account: a certain price level, that which is considered the most trivial by our social circumstances. Today, most people view any price increase with indifference, even if it is ruinous for our lives as human beings.

We were just about to enter into the practicalities, and we cannot make any further progress, ladies and gentlemen, unless as many people as possible develop an understanding of the specific issues. What do you expect to achieve with people who understand nothing of what needs to be done, who only understand what their agitators tell them? Do you think you can bring about a new economic order with them? You can only bring about a new economic order with those who have first gained an understanding of the demands of life itself. Everything else that the “key points of the social question” for a free economic life demand is already contained in this. For what individuals have spoken of, where it has been recognized – and after all, it must be said: the idea of threefolding, a part of it, is recognized – that is even made into an objection by theorists; people always come to me and say: Yes, what you are saying is already wanted here and there! I can only say to people: I would love it most of all if everything I say were already wanted. I am not at all striving to say something new, but rather what follows reasonably from the circumstances!

But that is the essential thing, that the details are demanded here or there, but that it is a matter of summarizing these very details. It is the big picture that is at stake. That is why spiritual science must intervene, because it educates in the big lines. It is right that here and there understanding arises for this or that, but then one must have the opportunity to bring it to bear. And so it also becomes clear to individuals how nonsensical it is when, for example, a judgment is to be made about an issue that should interest industry. Now, in the branches that have been nationalized, judgments are made by the state central representation or the like. That is, a majority of people make judgments that can, under certain circumstances, overrule that small minority who actually understand something about the matter; apart from everything else that is being developed in terms of reciprocity and so on, about which individual, namely western states, provide wonderful opportunities for study, as do southern states. Therefore, some have suggested: Well, we must have parliament, we must have the unified state; so at least for economic life we need industrial committees, professional representations in parliament. Yes, but what matters is that these professional representatives in parliament can first of all really assert for themselves what can then be decided from professional association to professional association, what is necessary; not that everything is mixed up again in one parliament, so that perhaps what is to be decided for this group is decided by the others, who have no say in it. Sometimes one has experienced very strange things in relation to majorities, for example in Austria, which is of course the “model state” for the downfall of the state. Because this Austrian state, one has seen it perish – I lived there for three decades – one has seen it perish if one has seen with open eyes what was actually going on there. In this Austrian state, there was a time when they wanted to revise the existing school law. They wanted to replace the existing school law with a reactionary one. This school law would have been rejected by a minority if conditions had been normal. The only way to achieve a majority was to get the Poles to vote with the other people in favor of this reactionary school law. The Poles had to form a majority with the other reactionaries. The Poles said at the time: “All right, we'll form a majority with you, we'll make the bad school law with you, but our Galicia must be exempted from this bad school law!” So the people came together in the common parliament. There was one community, the Polish delegation, that worked with the others to give the countries of the others, those who did not want it, a school law from which they exempted their own country. Krass stood out in particular at the time. But how could this not be the case in many other areas in a parliament like the Austrian one, which actually only had economic representatives? Because, you see, when a minister in Austria, Giskra, said at about the same time as Huber [in Stuttgart] set out his views: “There are no social issues, they stop at Bodenbach” – this has been discussed several times – people in this country were dreaming of a new era. Dreams came that a new era was needed and that a parliament had to be set up. So they set up the parliament based on four curiae: the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the cities, markets and industrial centers, the curia of the rural communities and the curia of the chambers of commerce – which, due to their special nature, were all economic cooperatives, all economic communities. They then formed the parliament, which made Austrian laws, fabricated rights. It is quite natural that a majority could not be formed by the representatives of the chambers of commerce and the large landowners, and that they made laws that were in their interests, not laws that would have emerged from what has been dawning more and more in humanity in modern times from the feeling of democracy. It is precisely those who take democracy seriously who must separate economic life and intellectual life, which cannot be based on democracy at all, but which arise from factual and specialized knowledge. They must separate economic life and intellectual life must separate economic life and intellectual life from what is legal life in the broadest sense, which can only develop when the mature human being opposes the other mature human being as an equal in parliament. But then only that which concerns every mature human being in relation to every other mature human being as an equal may be decided in this parliament. And the question must always be: it cannot be a matter of professional committees being formed in a democratic parliament and then the decisions being brought about by majority vote, but rather that what is the future action in economic life should emerge from negotiations, from the direct negotiations of economic associations, that which develops out of the essence of economic life itself.

What appears as the threefold social order is not a theory at all, it is not a program at all. I have experienced enough programs. In the 1880s, I used to drink my black coffee after dinner at the Viennese writers' café, the so-called Café Griensteidl. In addition to writers and authors of all sizes, poets, painters and sculptors – each was a great talent, which everyone else denied – social reformers and Marxists also met there. Viktor Adler was always there too. There you could experience the programs at noon and in the evening and at midnight in the most diverse forms. Everyone always knew what was best, and everyone thought the world would become a paradise when their social program was implemented. The opposite of all this program-making is what is striven for by the threefold social organism. Put in a simple formula — what does it actually mean? It means that there are three distinct and separate spheres of interest in the social life of humanity. One of these is the spiritual life. No one has the right to claim that they know how this spiritual life can best be administered; no one has the right to say: I prescribe a program for this spiritual life. If you are grounded in reality, as you are in spiritual science, you will not say this. But one does say: Let this spiritual life be administered by the people who are called to do so, who are actively involved in it, then you can spare yourself your program; then the right thing will come about through what life brings forth. The point is not to set out programs for the threefold social order, but to point out how people must find themselves in life so that from week to week, from year to year, the best arises in life itself. And in the same way, it is a matter of giving economic life a form such that, through economic activity, that which must arise again and again arises. For you see, the most absurd thing of all is to draw up social programs that are supposed to apply forever. Because the social question arises once and for all, but it cannot be solved overnight. The social question is a certain kind of living condition, it is a human question, and the only way to solve it is to organize life in such a way that it is continuously resolved, so that from week to week, from year to year, from decade to decade, there are always people who can bring about what can solve the social questions. The social question cannot be solved all at once, but must be solved continually throughout life. But for this it is necessary that this life should be such that the people who are called to solve it develop out of this life.

Apart from economic and spiritual questions, there are still those that simply arise between people who have come of age. These are decided democratically. They are the legal questions in the broadest sense. That is what life itself demands: that is, we must not formulate a program or develop a theory, but we must reflect on how people should live together so that life can be shaped. Today we cannot discuss whether it is already too late for European civilization, or whether there is still time for people to come together in this way. But we should keep saying to ourselves: the social question has not been grasped in its true form because the essential thing has never been expressed at all, because it was always believed that programs had to be found or institutions had to be devised, whereas it would have been necessary to communicate in such a way that humanity would have formed common interests where life demands common interests. If economic life is, of course, to stand on its own feet today – we cannot demand that tomorrow the people who are inside, who are now full of liberal, socialist or conservative ideas, should judge from the point of view of economic requirements. In the 1950s and 1960s, this would have been possible to a high degree. Today, far too much confused stuff has entered people's heads. But that is not for us to decide; instead, we muster the will to ensure that the right thing happens even today. But we should keep an eye on how, by diverting attention to completely different areas instead of coming together in the face of aligned interests, we have to divert things to completely different areas. Let us assume, hypothetically at first – which, of course, is a hypothesis today – that people, regardless of whether they are supervisors or employees, are fully involved in economic life and have been accustomed to deciding economic issues based on economic facts for some time. Then, even if it took a generation, a commonality of interests would have formed, which must exist, for example, when those who are producers have to work together. The worker and the foreman both have the same interest, if only the same interests are cultivated. The worker and the foreman do not have different interests with regard to, for example, remuneration; they have the same interests. But in order for their feelings to be fulfilled by these same interests, they have to oversee economic life. You can only oversee it if you can learn about one association by having something to do with the next association, which in turn has something to do with the next one [and so on], so that a network of relationships of trust is formed. You can only learn what the true interest is in this way. Instead, true interests are carried out of all this. The people who are work managers stand there [in the blackboard drawing: filled circles ), the employees stand there [in the blackboard drawing: open circles ). The foremen will stand there, the employees will stand there, and so on, and so on. And just as the party forms itself in parliament – what is together here in real work stands together, separated by party lines, fighting each other – an unnatural relationship, a nonsensical relationship when considered in terms of life! Why? Because economic life is not separate, does not live in its independence, but those who work in it organize themselves into parties according to completely different aspects, into parliamentary parties. If life here has nothing to do with anything other than what concerns all people of legal age as equals, which has nothing to do with what arises within economic life itself, then it is impossible for that which wants to develop into our time.

These things are found difficult to understand. Those who find them difficult to understand say: Yes, it is not clear. Yes, my dear audience, this is just life, and what is from life requires that those who want to understand it look at life. But today people no longer look at life, today they look at their prejudices. One person has acquired his prejudices from Marx, another from the liberal or social-democratic leaders, a third from the pastor, and so on and so forth. Today they only look at what is theory, what they only call practice. And so today one senses something of what individual people have actually felt for a long time.

You see, something strange happened to me. I gave a lecture in Stuttgart and also here in various places in Switzerland, in which I said, based on the matter: Today, instead of an original spiritual life, we have a phrase that is very close to the lie; instead of a real legal life, we have only convention. Something similar could perhaps still happen in relation to these things. But now I have spoken about the third area, about the economic, and I have said: in the economic sphere we do not have a real practice of life, not that which grows out of economic conditions, but mere routine. Now you think that is what I said, and today I read – namely, only today I read this Huber, really, I am not trying to pin something on you that is not true, I really read him today – and there I read in this Huber – he has invented certain corporate interests, I read in this Huber: “But where in our empire?” — says the 1869 in Stuttgart —, “where are the men who can make these arrangements?” And then he continues and says: “Least of all do we find them among practitioners, among those who call themselves practitioners, because today nothing but routine prevails there.” And – he says – we would need at least ten [men]. “But when I look around,” he says, “I want to exempt his majesty right away (he is, as people were then, loyal, a very loyal gentleman), but since he is out of the question anyway, not only are there not ten, but around the steps of the throne and everywhere outside there is not even one.”

I don't know, I couldn't quickly examine the extent to which the man was right for the year [18]69; but in our present circumstances, one has every reason to seek out those who at least have a heart and mind for studying and responding to the real circumstances. That is what is at stake today. We need people who recognize that a renewal of intellectual life and a reorganization of economic life on its own foundations are absolutely necessary. We need this because we have to relieve the state, which then forms the third link of the threefold social organism with its legal and related relationships. Everything in more detail can be found in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. We need this third link, which throws the others to the left and right; in short, we need the structure of the social organism from which a structure of the human being can emerge that is suited to the difficult, extraordinarily complicated and difficult conditions of the present, which will become even more complicated and difficult in the near future.

That is why I wanted to draw attention to this again today: that an impulse in the social sphere does not come from Dornach here with a spiritual-scientific movement through an arbitrary act, not through the arbitrariness of an individual [person] and not through the arbitrariness of the Anthroposophical Society, because it is actually true what individual people have repeatedly and repeatedly come to realize in recent decades: Things can only improve if we undertake a fundamental transformation of our entire spiritual life. But this transformation must not remain a mere theoretical demand, it must not be expressed only in idealistic terms, it must not shrink back from really presenting to the world a spirit such as has not been known before. Many people today can talk about the spirit. But it is not a matter of talking about the spirit, but of giving positive, concrete spirit. Positive, concrete spirit must be creative, creatively also in economic life. The time must be considered over when people said: Economic life is external, the spiritual world is not involved in it, it is found precisely when one departs from economic life, when one leaves the coarse material, when one ascends to the spiritual in higher regions. The time when people spoke in this way, that is the time that brought about rivers of blood in Europe. And the people who still speak from their pulpits today: 'Return to the old Christianity!' — to them we must say again and again: If we return to you, we can indeed start again — with the things that finally led us to 1914. It is a matter of having the courage to really present the new spirit to people. But then we must also be serious about it. Today, people approach us and say, 'So, what is being done in Dornach in the economic sphere?' Let us say, for example, that someone who is involved in economic life in America says, 'It's all very well to be working on the economy in Dornach; if they know how to do it, they should tell us.' This would imply that we are demanding a program. But here we are not working with programs, with things that are alien to life, but here we are seeking to create life. Therefore, no one can demand of us that we find a program to be implemented by this or that American bank, but here it is a matter of creating a center of life that is a real, living center around which people must organize themselves. Therefore, the American bankers must be told: It does not depend on you working out your program through your bank, which is given to you from here; but it depends on you centering what you do around Dornach, that you seek union with Dornach. Because it is not about issuing lifeless programs, but about creating a real center that must create as such. Here one cannot merely study; from here one should work.

The essential thing is that everything that comes from here is seen as life, not as theory, not as thought, not as idea. Therefore, those who go to Dornach or to the Waldorf School to see how things are done, how they themselves can do it, will not get it right. Rather, those who understand: Here a beginning has been made, here a start has been made. One must work together with that with which the start has been made, not with a theory but with life. In working together, ladies and gentlemen, we can find ourselves with all the people of the civilized world today - but in living together.

We must once and for all make it clear that the spirit does not live in empty thoughts, not in abstractions. And because we want to assert here that the spirit does not live in abstractions, that the spirit is a living thing, we cannot satisfy the person who only wanted to seek out what abstract thoughts are, which could now be realized in any way , but we can only satisfy those who understand that we must work together in the sense in which it is characterized, as it is suggested - but not programmatized - in the “Key Points of the Social Question” and the next issue of “The Future”. Not just lecturing from here that the mind is a living thing, but the living mind should be sought. We will see whether there is enough understanding in the world for the fact that the living spirit, not the abstract spirit, must be sought, that we must seek for an improvement of the future, for a true construction not just any abstract idea, but [that we must seek] the living spirit. (Lively applause.)

Discussion

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen, is there perhaps someone here who has a question to ask orally or something to say? Two questions have been submitted in writing (about the “threefold state”; question of whether a school association should have a say in the free spiritual life of the “threefold state”).

Now, esteemed attendees, sometimes it is necessary for me to become a terrible pedant, which I otherwise abhor, for the sake of the matter! The state is conceived of as one of the three limbs of the threefold social organism, and it is actually impossible to say: the threefold state. It can be tolerated for the sake of expediency, but attention must also be drawn to such things from time to time. I am saying this because the question here explicitly mentions “the threefold state”.

Now, questions are understandably asked from the present consciousness, and that is ultimately quite right. But if you want to look at life, you have to realize that life is a process of becoming, and that some things that are desirable may only happen after a long time, but that, if the courage is there, they may also happen relatively quickly. And so one must also consider the questions a little, must consider that questions are asked from the circumstances of the present, perhaps even from the very close circumstances of the future, but in a form that can no longer be asked. Not this question, in particular. Because, believe me, it will be a matter of the spiritual life being administered by those who are alive in it. Those who are truly alive in it will naturally have to ensure that all that can in any way be favorable to their decisions is fully incorporated into them. Now imagine that I am a primary school teacher and a child enters the first class at the Waldorf School. It would be perfectly natural for the school to proceed in the same way as a sensible doctor would, who, when a case of illness arises, does not make a snap judgment but familiarizes himself with the biography of the patient. You have to get to know and read the biography when you get a schoolchild in order to know what the child has been through so far. The best way to get to know the child is, of course, to talk to the mother, although the father should not be left out completely. But here only the mothers are asked. Take just one small point from what I said today about the free spiritual life. Take seriously the fact that this free spiritual life will bring to fruition all those factors that make this free spiritual life possible. What follows from this? It follows inevitably that mothers will be drawn into it. This is self-evident! But we should not want to transfer to the free spiritual life what has so terribly emerged bit by bit in the old spiritual life. When something occurred somewhere, no matter how trivial, you could hear everywhere: Yes, a law should be made. People had nothing else on their minds but: a law should be made. A law should be made for everything! So I took the liberty of saying in a lecture in Nuremberg: What is the ideal of the modern person? And I characterized this there in such a way that I said: Man actually only wishes nowadays that he is always accompanied in his life by a policeman on his left and a doctor on his right; so that he has the doctor for the time of illness, and the policeman or another faculty takes care of the other half of life. That is precisely what we want to achieve with such a social organism: to enable people to take care of themselves, to produce, as a matter of course, what is needed for the laws that the philistines want everywhere. I know that today people usually say in such a case: Yes, but people are not yet mature enough for that. For me, this and many other things are precisely the reason why, when someone tells me: People are not yet mature enough for that, I answer that two things result from this; firstly, that he considers himself mature, and secondly, that he is certainly not mature when he thinks that he understands this, but that the others are not yet mature for it, that he is therefore judging from a subconscious self-knowledge that is not alive in his consciousness. It is not a matter of waiting for people to mature, because we can wait until the end of the days on earth, but rather of seizing the moment and then waiting to see what happens under the circumstances. When people mature, some questions simply resolve themselves out of the circumstances.

The other question that has been asked here is: “Can any of the forms of association that are common today, a labor cooperative or an individual company, be considered particularly suitable as a starting point for the associative form?”

Now, my dear attendees, consider life in its becoming again. Consider it in such a way that it is constantly transforming itself, just like the organism itself, until a certain degree of stationarity is initially achieved in one area or another, then remains for a period of time, and then dies off. You will find it already hinted at in the 'Key Points of the Social Question'. What we have today should initially be the starting point. It cannot be any different. Today we have joint-stock companies; indeed, we even set them up. We have set one up in Stuttgart. So we set them up ourselves, are in the process of setting one up here, as humanities scholars. We are building everywhere on what already exists. We are not talking about some utopian fantasy, but want to build on what already exists. Then we might have all sorts of associations emerging from what already exists: cooperatives, joint-stock companies, I don't know what all, and we are only looking for the associations. [See blackboard drawing, p. 597]

But the fact that these associations enter associative life means that they change again, and that the joint-stock companies will take on a different form when associative life awakens. The cooperatives will also take on a different form. It does not matter - suppose there were a corporation here that was abominable, it would also associate. By itself it is abominable; but by being placed in the network of association, it is constantly influenced, gradually carried along by what arises from associating, and in time becomes something quite different, or perishes. For us, it is not a matter of abolishing something, but of accepting things as they are. And if something is bad, then it naturally perishes. But to abolish something through laws can never be the issue.

That is what weighs most today, that healthy thoughts must first enter human souls! You see, I would like to say this, although it was already hinted at in the lecture: the fact is that what hurts most today is that for a long time no effort has been made to build the bridge across the gulf between the classes. What concern did they have for the fate of the proletariat during the long decades of the second half of the nineteenth century? Basically, they watched what was happening; they didn't care much about it, except that they sometimes heard in larger cities that people said: There's a house again where they're having thicker shutters made because they're afraid something will break out soon! – At most, people were concerned about such things in this way. But no one sought to create a vibrant life that would have been the basis for understanding.

In my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future,” you will find an indication of how the worker in each factory should actually be led through the entire process of production, introduced to the knowledge of the raw products, and made familiar with the path the product takes, so that he has a common interest with the plant manager and takes an interest in it. Today, of course, this is still very difficult, and even if it is aspired to, it cannot be achieved overnight! It is still very difficult today for the very reason that you can experience being in a company and getting along very well with one or two workers; you get along very well with them. But when it comes to making a decision, they say to you: Yes, but I can't have the same opinion, I have to have the opinion that my union dictates to me. That's just how people are today. But why have they become like that? They have become like that because in the leading circles, where leadership should have remained, there was no desire to get to know the world. Yes, they said they wanted to get to know it, they gradually did something out of their ideas. But the one who has gotten to know it knows even more about the things.

From the years when I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School, which was basically a Social Democratic institution, I could see how the plant managers knew absolutely nothing about what was going on among the workers, and I could see how they were not interested in it either. What I am saying now may be seen as an exaggeration, because one is in the same case as the one who says that laws should... [illegible in shorthand] and so on, and so on. The states may want to stifle intellectual life, but here in X we feel no such oppression. Just as they closed their eyes there, closed for decades to what was actually coming! At most, they locked people up. But what matters is that a person really gets to know life. And that is still missing today to the utmost degree. That is one thing I would like to say in response to such questions.

From what is said, one can tell everywhere that people only know a small circle. That will change. Just consider what I said in response to...; the people were not stupid at all: here he comes and asks, and the arguments that were put forward were very clever; but they could not know anything about what is explained when one is inside a factory. Through the associations that arise more and more, where one is in a lively exchange, where one does not have to check first, but where one knows how far trust can be placed in things, one's own experience teaches what can be learned. That is what you need for your judgment. Until now, you could only judge according to prejudices and therefore judged by the by. And economic experience is given by those principles of association that I spoke of in my “key points”. That is what matters.

Does anyone still have a question?

Emil Molt, Stuttgart: I don't know whether it is allowed, whether there is still time to ask a few questions, because I don't know whether here in Dornach there is a rule that when social questions are discussed there is neither time nor clocks; but for us in Stuttgart it is the case that we can really talk without time. I would now like to tie in with what has just been said.

Especially if you are a working person involved in the threefold order, then it weighs heavily on your soul, especially in recent times, that you have had so few points of attack to implement the threefold order in reality. Last year, as has also been mentioned this evening, we tried to to put the threefolding into practice through the proletariat, and in doing so, we did not, however, disregard the fact that bourgeois circles, above all among these circles, should also become acquainted with the matter. The success has been described this evening. The parties have withdrawn their sheep, and the employers have rejected us from the start. Our work continued. Something left over from working with the proletariat is always like this: the proletarian side in particular is still showing us the judgments that, for example, all the meetings that have now been held by associations, parties and so on are so terribly boring and full of empty phrases. We are told this by the proletariat in particular, that it was a different time, when Dr. Steiner in Stuttgart still had something to tell us about the issues, about the social issues.

But we do find that the proletariat in general is not sufficiently mature to fully grasp the core issues. And we find, on the other hand, that the business community simply makes it impossible by dismissing anyone who works intensively in this direction as a Spartacist or Bolshevik.

We always ask ourselves: What can be done, especially now, not only to get the threefold order into people's heads, but above all to introduce it into practice? And here I would like to, because the question is actually always coming up again and again, especially now that in Germany [...] is such a way that employers would rather cling to big capitalism than to implement social progress, and on the other hand, the trend is so strongly to the right that we have to take that into account. They have a completely different view of things. In these times, people who dedicate their entire being to the threefold order are repeatedly shaken by the question: What has to happen to implement the threefold order of the social organism before it is too late, before it is impossible, before civil wars and economic chaos occur? In this regard, the one who is asking the question feels a particularly heavy burden on his soul from posing this question, and he would be grateful for an answer.

Rudolf Steiner: If I have understood the question correctly, it is this: How is it possible today to introduce anything practical at all into the world in the field of threefolding, given the resistance that is ultimately brought from all sides to the threefolding of the social organism?

This question is, of course, the one that weighs on one. But on the other hand, this question is based on a completely different one that must not be ignored. That is precisely the question: how do you approach something in a truly living way? And I have basically already hinted at something in answer to this question very quietly between the lines in the lecture, by saying: Of course we have also made mistakes. And that is true. We have not yet grown out of the child's shoes in the practice of the threefold social organism. For example, I want to draw attention to the following.

If you want to have a living effect, if you want to promote something in life, then it is important to really work out of life and try to understand life. Now, the situation today is that when one speaks before a proletarian assembly, one has the choice of either speaking in the language of the proletarians about what is ultimately for the good of the proletarians, developing it out of the ideas that the proletarians have. And I have always tried to do that. Or you can do the other: you talk from a general theory, you say this and that must happen – then you are thrown out the door! Because the proletariat today is very quick to make its decision.

Now, that actually never happened in Stuttgart, that we were thrown out the door; but something else happened. You see, I naturally spoke in such a way everywhere that I was not thrown out the door, because I would not have considered it very beneficial – I don't just mean because of the small abrasions that can happen, but because then you can't achieve anything, right, you can't achieve anything from outside the door! I didn't speak in such a way that you were thrown out the door. But then it is known that I said this or that in this or that meeting. Then I spoke to someone who was even a minister, and to him I said in all my innocence: Just wait and see what comes of it. It's not about throwing things in people's faces that make them angry, but about getting people to work with you.

So we wait until we are ready to work together. Then what must be the arithmetic mean of one opinion and the other, will perhaps emerge, or the others will be converted to your opinion, and so on. But we have to work from life.

And I was inclined to do that too! So you just face things like that. You get angry when you hear that something has been said somewhere that only differs in form from what you are used to hearing; and in this regard, you see, we really have made mistakes. For example, I gave a lecture to the workers at the Daimler factory that could only have had a favorable effect if it had been understood in this way – it was spoken for the workers at the Daimler factory, it was spoken in their language.

Well, unfortunately it is the custom in our circles that it is always demanded, and it cannot be resisted, that everything that is spoken in front of any audience should now be printed with skin and hair and should also be readable for everyone else out of context.

Yes, my dear attendees, that is simply not on! And you should realize that it is not on. It is not possible for something like that to happen. We should refrain from broadcasting what I say to a particular audience to the whole world lock, stock and barrel, because it can only be understood in context. Therefore, I understand very well that I received a letter from Nuremberg from a bourgeois pastor who, of course, could not think the way a worker at the Daimler factory can think now, for example. It may happen that people come together when they really work. But it is quite natural that he was angry about the lecture at the Daimler factory, that it is so and must be so! But it is really not about me giving a lecture to excite the delight of a Nuremberg bourgeois pastor, but about working in a lively way, about bringing the proletariat to where it should be for its own good, in cooperation with the other circles, someday.

That is what we want to put into practice. It must be clearly understood that we are not speaking theoretically here, but as life demands, never taking anything for granted that misses the truth, but saying what life demands.

But now, I would say, everything of this kind must not be schematized. It would also be wrong to schematize it. Suppose I were to give a lecture here on Thomism, on Thomas Aquinas, and a socialist were to come who had never heard of the context. Well, he would naturally be furious about it. There is no way to prevent him from becoming angry at the public lecture. But the practical work must nevertheless be done differently than we have done it so far. One has to understand that there is differentiation in life. And so it is important that we first really agree on this preliminary question: How do we get together a number, a sufficiently large number of people – we don't have that yet – who really show that things have now reached the point where it can be seen that people no longer even speak a language that can be understood by each other, and that one must rise above what is spoken on the one side and on the other side on the party sides. Above all, we must work to spread our views, and only when we have a sufficiently large number of people will we be in a position to introduce our views further into contemporary universal life.

It is the same with all things that depend on willpower. You can see that life can only give you opportunities to become pessimistic from day to day. But one must will optimistically; one must will in such a way that what one sets out to do will happen. After all, free human will does not consist of always saying, “This cannot happen and that cannot happen”; rather, it is a matter of knowing what one wills and working in the direction of that will. And that is the only thing we can really do in the first instance, each in our own place. Then an extraordinary amount will happen; there is an objective difficulty in putting the threefold order into practice as a whole.

You see, my “Key Points of the Social Question” have grown out of decades of observation of European life in all its aspects. They have grown entirely out of practical life. And I am convinced that if the practitioners were to take them up, it would be best to reach an understanding. The reason why no agreement can be reached is not that the practitioners have not got into the habit of checking what is said on the basis of practice, but because they say: reform ideas in a book! Books contain theories, so it is a theory. People do not read the book. If they read and study it, they would see that it is different from other books. So this objective difficulty is a factor. Unlike all other similar books, this book, 'The Core of the Social Question', is a book of life. It is the product of decades of observation; there is nothing invented in it. Therefore, it does not come across in such a way that one could say it is easy to understand, like a newspaper article. But I would never want to admit that this book, for example, cannot be made understandable to everyone in serious work. I think it is also the case with this book that I found that theater directors always said: Yes, we won't get an audience with this play, we have to give other plays - which they imagined should get an audience. I have had the most extraordinary experiences there. For example, I met a theater director who was talked into a play; he gave it a try, and he was completely convinced, he only did it out of complaisance. And one evening he did it – and it was a failure. He bet his wife, who had a different opinion, he bet her the entire royalties that were coming to him. The wife bet him that if the play went well, she would get the royalties. Well, the man lost his bet, the play became one of the best-visited plays. So he said in his theater language: At the theater, you can fake everything, you can fake criticism, you can fake approval, you can fake everything, just not the box office. You can't fake the box office. At least it doesn't help if you fake the box office.

This is basically how it is when you say that something cannot be made understandable. It can be made understandable if you just find the right way of doing it. And I can't really go into the question of why it was said in Stuttgart that the evenings were interesting back then when I was there and then they became boring; but I would like to bring this matter into what I would call a direction of will. It is really not a matter of brooding over why things are the way they are, but of trying to find ways and means to make things understandable, to make things popular, and above all, not to harbor illusions. It is no different than that we first need a sufficiently large number of people who understand our ideas; then it will work. But we must never sit back and do nothing; we just have to work. And I believe we will find understanding if we do not shut the door on ourselves too easily by acting not out of life but out of our prejudices. We must not throw every theory in everyone's face, but we must speak to everyone in their language; not because we think they are more stupid than we are, but because it is sometimes difficult for us to speak in their language when they are cleverer than we are; but even then we should try to speak in their language, even if they are much cleverer than we are in their field.

Perhaps it is necessary for us to develop and maintain a real life practice for the promotion of the threefold social organism.

Emil Molt: Perhaps I can correct something about the boring evenings that were party meetings. The proletarians have learned to see that party meetings in particular are full of the most outrageous nonsense, and that it was different in the old days at the trade union building than it is now, when we still organized lectures for the public.

Rudolf Steiner: I just wanted to say that I understood that the evenings back then were interesting and that afterwards the party line was followed, of course not by our people. That's not what I meant, but what I meant was that it doesn't help us if people realize that they have got to know something better. It does speak well for the people when they realize this, but it does not help us if they do not follow us. We only have an influence on them if they put into practice what they have decided. Don't you agree, you see, with us the meetings were interesting. But they don't go to us, but to the others. This just goes to show that, above all, it must be considered how people are like a flock of sheep, how they simply follow their leaders, no matter whether they talk boring stuff or not. They also vote for their leaders when it comes to something, and they follow the training. And we have no illusions about this. It is no use just holding interesting meetings for the people; it only helps if we manage to throw out the leaders and lead the people. That is the experience. Of course, it takes time, and many other things are needed; but here too we have made mistakes, we have negotiated too much with the leaders. We should not have done that. Because we should have been clear about it from the very beginning: the people do not want to understand us and cannot understand us. And so it is in many different ways that we should and want to first acquire the full practice of life.

So I beg you not to think that I meant that our meetings have become boring; rather, I meant that this judgment is of no help to us. What good does it do to enter into a discussion about a judgment that is unfruitful in people? It doesn't help at all.

You see, I knew a Catholic priest very well. He often walked with me – I was still at school – for almost an hour, the way I had to make from school to home. In that place, there were often Jesuit sermons. And the pastor talked with me, even though I was still quite young, actually quite sincerely. I said to him at the time, out of all naivety: Yes, Reverend, how is it that you don't preach the sermons yourself? You only need to do that for the same community every Sunday. Why do you bring the Jesuits over for that? That's not necessary. - He replied: That's right, but it is necessary to talk the cabbage into people; only in this way are they good. And I won't talk it into them myself, they can't ask me to!

So what use is it for a person to understand something if they act differently because of the social structure in which they live! That is precisely what we have to come to, to understand life without illusion, completely soberly, even though we aspire to the highest heights of spiritual life. - I don't know if I have answered the question exhaustively.

Emil Molt: Certainly, Doctor.

Rudolf Steiner: Is there anything else that needs to be asked? Emil Molt: I have already pointed out that in Stuttgart it was not the custom to go home so soon after meeting someone.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, here there seems to be a tendency to

go home and go to bed. So I bid you all good night.

Distinguished attendees! There is no doubt that, under the influence of the war catastrophe that has touched humanity so deeply, and the outcome of which is by no means already clear, many circles have already come to the conclusion that the tasks that have arisen from the development of humanity can by no means be solved with small means; above all, it cannot be solved with the means by which one believed, in the various fields of public life, one could cope before this catastrophe, which devastated civilization so much.

Among the victors, however, there still prevails today, I might say, an understandable mood that does not make it seem necessary to move from old habits of thought, from old feelings and will impulses to new ones. And basically there are very few personalities, especially in the victorious countries, who are already somehow willing to depart from the old habits of thinking and feeling about the public affairs of humanity. One would like to say, like a white raven, the man who was present at these important negotiations for part of the time during the negotiations in Versailles, John Maynard Keynes. This John Maynard Keynes has just gained an impression from the negotiations in Versailles that no possible outcome for the shaping of the present civilized world can emerge from the attitudes and schools of thought that prevailed there.

In his introduction today, I would like to mention a very vivid picture painted by John Maynard Keynes of the personalities who were so decisive for the fate of Europe at that time. He points to the one who has long been regarded as a kind of political savior by a large part of the world, whose abstract, unrealistic 14 points were recognized for a short time in Germany as a basis for peace. Keynes points out how this man, when he arrived in Versailles, under triumph that was actually meant for the image that had been made of him, proved to be completely out of touch with the current situation in Europe, as he had absolutely no capacity to engage with what was put to him. It is fair to say – and this is entirely fitting for Keynes's comments, who after all witnessed it all – that he allowed himself to be taken in by those who were so significant for the future of Europe at the time, by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Woodrow Wilson was seen as a savior of the world. John Maynard Keynes, who left the negotiations in Versailles early despite being an English member of parliament because of the hopelessness of the negotiations, characterizes Wilson as a man whose intentions were not at all suited to providing any kind of impetus for reality. He characterizes Clemenceau as a man who had actually overslept the whole of more recent developments since 1871, who was only still filled with the moods that one had in France at the time, and who, with a wild rage, did everything he could to shape Europe as he had to imagine it according to his old habits of thought, actually national habits.

And Keynes characterized Lloyd George, his own Prime Minister, as follows: Despite his ability to intuitively perceive the thoughts of others, he was only looking for results with which he could shine for a few weeks in England, in London.

Then Keynes wrote his book about the economic consequences of this ill-fated peace treaty. And this book seems to me to be a remarkable symptom of the state of mind, the whole way of thinking and feeling, that is present in our current public life. For this book, if you have carefully gone through it, you get the feeling that it should actually be twice as thick as it is, because the most important thing is only pointed out on the last page, and basically, any elaboration is missing for these references.

John Maynard Keynes is an economic politician. He is well aware that the design of Europe - and this is certainly proven by current events - that the design of Europe, which one imagined in Versailles to be able to achieve, is not lasting at all. He calculates this, so to speak, from the economic measures that were taken in Versailles. And it is remarkable, ladies and gentlemen, that he calculates all this as an Englishman, as an English-thinking person. And then he says something very strange at the end: All signs indicate that if a broad reflection does not occur, we will be led into barbarism within the modern European civilized world. And he says nothing less than this: The affairs of the near future will not be determined by the actions of statesmen, but by currents of thought and feeling and will beneath the surface of what is usually called “public life.” Yes, he says much more. He says: If we do not develop completely new powers of perception and, as he puts it, imagination with regard to public affairs – he means visualizing certain images that we need to shape the future – we cannot move forward. This is how this manifesto of a significant statesman and thinker of the present day concludes. And yet one has to ask the question: Yes, but how is humanity supposed to develop within these intimate currents hinted at by Keynes? Where are they supposed to come from? Where are new forces of knowledge, where are new forces of imagination about the shaping of our economic conditions supposed to come from?

This book concludes with a huge question mark regarding the great tasks of the present day, but so do all the negotiations that have been conducted so far after the provisional outcome of the great world catastrophe in 1918. And only because it has taken on a different form are people calming down a little about it for the time being.

You see, my esteemed audience, the great questions of the present will naturally have to arise in those areas that were actually the basic areas of all public and community life for humanity. They will have to arise in the areas of intellectual life, of state and legal life, and in the area of economic life. Admittedly, we have to say that a large number of people today only see the great tasks of the time in the area of economic life. But anyone who, I might say, with the same objective but somewhat deeper than Keynes, is able to see through public affairs, cannot help but say to himself: the great tasks of the time are not being solved today with what one has been accustomed to thinking, which has led to the catastrophe. Completely new impulses are needed. And these new impulses, where must they come from?

I believe, esteemed attendees, that we will not arrive at an answer to this question if we do not look at it from a certain point of view, which I would like to suggest here, if we do not observe how thinking and feeling and looking at the world has developed in recent times, since the last three to four centuries, especially within Europe, but also within its offshoot, America. We must look at human thinking. Most people in the present still do not want to think about this, that ultimately everything in the state and ultimately everything in economic conditions ultimately comes from human thinking.

If we look a little deeper again, without prejudice, and look at the European situation in particular, we clearly see a kind of declining life, and on the other hand a kind of rising life. The declining life, viewed spiritually, is actually still a kind of inheritance from ancient human cultures. In Europe, we have impulses of world view that express themselves in philosophies, religious beliefs and other things. Today, however, we do not ask ourselves thoroughly enough where these ideological impulses actually come from. We will think more freely about these ideological impulses, which are also present in our economic life, when we are clear about what has actually only been clearly drawn from Western culture into this ancient oriental heritage of a world view culture since the last three to four centuries. Has it not been emphasized often enough – and from a certain point of view one is quite right to do so – that the greatest source of pride in modern times should be the spirit of science that has emerged in the last three to four centuries? Of course, old beliefs and the like are still deeply ingrained in a large part of the population of the civilized world today. These should not be spoken of in a critical way; their value should be fully recognized. But what could be called the greatest authority in the life of thought, feeling and perception in modern times is indisputably that which has emerged as the spirit of science.

When speaking of this scientific spirit, one must not only look at what lives in an upper class, where science as such is practised. The scientific spirit can also mean something else. Today, in an age when popular literature and newspapers reach even the seemingly uneducated, one can speak of the fact that perhaps not the scientific results and insights as such, but their offshoots, that which arises from them as a way of feeling, penetrates into the widest circles. Today, one can be a good Catholic or a good Protestant in one's inner life and in terms of one's religious confession; but when it comes to judging what is immediate reality, what surrounds one in life, then one regards the modern spirit of science as the actual authority. And this spirit of science is, after all, what we can follow in the social views of the present. We can trace it in the social views that have gradually developed among the proletariat throughout Europe since the mid-nineteenth century. Within this social view, people have always been proud of the fact that what they imagined as a social organization should be carried by the spirit of modern “unbiased science”. And to this day, one will find that even such destroyers of public life as appear in Eastern Europe, that even Trotsky and Lenin, when they want to talk about the foundations of their social thinking, then assert this spirit of science. So that one can say: in these social utopias, which, however, gain a very unfortunate reality, this spirit of science wants to be shaped.

This spirit of science has its clearest form in all that has emerged in recent times in the Western, more materialistic way of thinking and looking at things. It is not so much rooted in the Central European way of thinking, because, my dear attendees, if you take such characteristic personalities of Central Europe as Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Schiller, and also the German philosophers, you will find something quite different in their way of thinking from that of an Adam Smith or an English philosopher like Spencer or Darwin. On the other hand, it can be said that the spirit of science, which spread across the civilized world from the west, gradually engulfed the very different ideas that the personalities just mentioned sought to assert in Central Europe. And if we want to grasp what has asserted itself as modern science, then we have to juxtapose this scientific approach with the greatest question that exists for human beings, the greatest question that arises from our desire for knowledge as well as from his longing to gain enlightenment about his place in the world, to gain impetus for his social action, yes, which is also the most significant question when it is about the origin of the noblest in community life, about the activity of love among people. And the most important question is that concerning the essence of the human being itself. Recognizing the human being, understanding the human being, getting along with the human being, being able to live together with people – that is ultimately what all human thought must tend towards if the human being is not to lose the ground from under his feet.

And just look at how little, in the field of knowledge, what can be called the modern spirit of science has actually come to terms with.

It is not at all the intention of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to belittle what the spirit of natural science or any other scientific spirit has achieved in modern times. No, my dear ladies and gentlemen, with regard to the recognition of the great triumphs and the full significance of modern science for life, I am at least in full agreement with all the eulogists of this spirit of science. That much should be acknowledged from the outset, and I agree from the outset with all those who speak of the importance of this spirit of science. But something else must be said if the highest goal of human beings, as just characterized – knowledge of the human being, insight into the human essence, seeing through to the very foundations of love – if that is to be placed alongside this spirit of science.

Let us take the field of knowledge first. Here we see – let me pick out an example that is well known in the widest circles – here we see how magnificently this science was able to pursue, out of the Darwinian-Spencerian spirit, which was then perfected in a somewhat different way by the German Haeckel, how this scientific spirit was able to follow the whole series of organisms in their development. To follow how that which appears to us as perfect emerges from the imperfect and how, at the pinnacle of this development, humans stand as physical beings. But one should just try to gain an unbiased view of what is actually presented.

How do we understand the human being from this point of view? Well, we follow everything that is found in the human being, in his organization, even in his soul life, through the entire series of animals. Again, with a certain right from one point of view, and by having become acquainted with everything that is organization, with everything that is the condition of organic life, by having become acquainted with this through the series of animals up to man, one understands him as a more perfect animal, but one must actually stop at that. By applying everything we have learned about the non-human world to humans, we can say that humans are at the top of the animal kingdom, but we only characterize them based on what we have learned about the world outside of humans, and we are left powerless in the face of the big question: What is a human being? One is satisfied with this, because one cannot recognize the human being from the human being, but only from the extra-human.

Whoever visualizes the full tragedy of this modern scientific spirit, which by its very nature must stop at nothing, will understand how perhaps today in the subconscious depths of the soul of the majority of humanity, precisely the question of the nature of the human being is gnawing away, and how it works as a longing for something other than what this modern scientific spirit can give.

How do we see this scientific spirit at work, my dear audience, in the field of knowledge? How do we see it at work within social feeling? Within the view of social conditions?

We have to go back a little further, because what is still alive in the present is actually, in this respect, the result of what has developed over a long period of time within the European world. We must bear in mind that our European state structures, which are now crumbling, emerged from the remnants of what I would call “the ancient oriental heritage” in terms of world view. The spirit of science that asserted itself in the West is entirely different from the oriental spirit, which still asserts itself in the Christian creeds – not in Christianity, I will come back to that in a moment.

For this oriental spirit, the question of the essence of man is at the forefront. He does not know the same extent as the Western world, what I just mentioned before as the extra-human. This oriental spirit, which we find today in the Orient only in decadence, in decline, which in older times developed into its special greatness, it thought little of external experience. He did not think much of what we today rightly know as observation of nature and methodically base our world view on. He drew what he wanted to know about man, what he also wanted to implant in social life, from inner human enlightenment, from inner human imagination. If we want to characterize the difference between this oriental spirit and the spirit of western science, we have to say: this oriental spirit actually has a worldview through direct human intuition without science. That is the remarkable thing, and it can still be observed today in the Christian faiths. In later centuries, in medieval centuries, people no longer understood in the right way how the ancient oriental people came to this worldview without a spirit of science; but they took its content, the content they gave to the world, the content of enlightenment, of inner imagination. It has become grafted into European spiritual life. It could not be recognized as coming from there because the spiritual abilities that existed in the ancient Orient were no longer present.

And so the following came about as a development of humanity: let us look at what, for the spiritual researcher, is at the center of all of humanity's development on earth; let us look at the event of Golgotha, at the founding of Christianity. It arose out of spiritual foundations. I will only hint at this today, as I have discussed it in numerous writings, especially in the book 'Christianity as a Mystical Fact'. But the event of Golgotha is one thing as a fact, as something that happened; the way in which this event of Golgotha was understood at the time it happened and in the centuries immediately following is something else. It was understood through what had been handed down from ancient Oriental wisdom, without any spirit of science, from Asia through Greece and Rome. Understanding the mystery of Golgotha is, after all, different from the event of Golgotha itself. People wanted to understand the event of Golgotha with ancient Oriental worldviews, and they understood it for a long time.

And in the Middle Ages, what came into effect then? We see a strange clash between the ancient oriental in the human disposition and that which is already emerging as the dawn of the modern age. We see two powers established in the human soul in the Middle Ages, precisely in the Catholic spirit. We see references to the Revelation, which is said to come to man from transcendental heights, without seeking a human origin for it. And on the other hand, we see what human reason, human experience itself, is supposed to encompass. Both are given equal validity in this period. As newer human development emerges, that which is called revelation, but which is actually only the inheritance of the old, oriental spirit of world view, is increasingly being undermined. This no longer applies to actual public thinking and feeling [as an authority], even if it still asserts its authority within certain limits. And the other authority, which was to some extent only placed alongside the authority of revelation in the Middle Ages, namely the authority of reason, develops into the modern spirit of science. This modern spirit of science – what has it not yet achieved today?

Well, we have seen in the field of knowledge: it fails when it comes from the extra-human to the human. It knows nothing to counter the human yearning for knowledge of the human being. But it also knew nothing of the essence of the human being to bring into human vision in the social field. This development of European science without a worldview, it is basically extremely interesting. It presents itself in such a way that one sees: As the final product of that which basically comes from the ancient Orient, via the detour through the Arabs, and other detours, what then remains as something certain, as something authoritative, which also has an oriental origin , such as the creeds based on revelation, but which are not recognized as such, but are instead attributed to the character of science - what is that?

Dear attendees, that is the content of all mathematics. Just as its confession, the European human being has received his mathematics and the mechanical thinking related to it, which then lived out in the materialism of science, from the Orient, albeit very filtered. And in Europe, that which is, so to speak, the final product of the ancient oriental worldview, that which can arise out of the human being alone, for mathematics cannot be experienced externally, it must arise out of the human being, just like the ancient oriental worldview. And what has come to the European people is recognized by Galileo, by Newton, by the whole Western scientific spirit. It is one wing of the being that flies through the development of modern humanity, carrying the spirit of science to its highest heights. We see the mathematical spirit emerging, penetrating even the atoms with mathematics. The mathematical spirit is one side of modern science. And the other side, the other wing of this creature, which I have symbolically indicated, is what we can call the observation of the external world, the external observation of man himself.

This faithful observation of the external world was unknown to the Oriental. It is therefore not preserved in what remains of the old oriental world view, nor in the creeds. But it was revived within the European spirit of science. It is the other side of this spirit of science. This spirit of science grows out of two things: out of what arises from within the human being as mathematical thinking and observing, and out of what comes from observation. That which has been drawn into the soul of the European human being, especially the Western human being, has now also become decisive for social thinking. Anyone who, for example, can follow Adam Smith, Ricardo, all social thinkers up to Marx, up to the present ones, with an unprejudiced mind, will see that these two elements, which first entered into the scientific spirit, continue to be effective in social thinking as well. One need only survey with an unbiased mind what Adam Smith, and later Marx and others, have expounded, and one will find the thinking of Newton on the one hand, and the thinking of a mind like Spencer on the other, everywhere. And that which inspired Darwin to his theory of evolution can be found everywhere. But just as this spirit of science stopped in its tracks when it came to knowledge, and could not become a worldview in the field of knowledge, it could not become world-shaping in the social field. And so we see how this spirit, which has only been realized in these outstanding personalities, but which is basically inherent in all of European humanity, moves into a practical life that is increasingly becoming a true reflection of this spirit. Just as knowledge stops at the human being, so too does social life, in principle, stop at the human being.

What has this modern scientific spirit, which has educated and trained the leading minds, actually been able to achieve? Well, my dear audience, it has been able to achieve the magnificent modern technology. On the one hand, it introduced mathematical thinking into machines, into modern industrialism, into the modern monetary system, and even into the social organization of modern humanity. In this, this spirit has been great.

We can say that everything that is numerically recorded in the books of modern industry, of modern practice in general, is an image of this spirit that has become technology out of mathematics.

By contrast, little of the other, which is only just beginning to emerge, has been able to penetrate into the human being himself: observation, which is only now taking place on a large scale in the natural sciences. The fact that it has not been possible to penetrate to the human being with knowledge shows that it has not been possible to develop the strength to approach the human being in such a way as to understand the innermost part of the human being. What exists as a mere spirit of science in Adam Smith, in Ricardo and others, is evident in the whole of modern thinking, in that practice has become uninspired, that it has become a mere routine, that great in it is only the technique ; that great in it is everything that can come to the foothills of this technique, that can be great only in the work on the machine, but stops there, like knowledge before the human being, before all practical life, before social life. On the one hand, it stops short of man in knowledge; on the other hand, it stops short of man in social life. A person who today manages a factory, who is involved in a commercial enterprise or some other branch of modern practical life, cannot receive any education from what our scientific spirit in the West is, other than one that allows him to think right down to the very fibers of the technical, but which stops him as a foreman in front of the one who does the work.

It stops before man. It is terribly painful to follow this halting with inner understanding. Whoever looks into the human fabric of the present day sees how the leading and guiding circles, for whom the spirit of science has become authority, stop at nothing. They can enter everything that comes from the mathematical wing into their books, but how the education that comes from it as a people's education, as an education of the spirit, leaves no understanding for the human being as such. And so there is a boundary between people and people. And this boundary has become the terrible fate of modern civilization. Because that which could not be written in any head or cash book, where only the technical outflows are written, right down to the treatment of people, that arose in modern times with the demands of a humane existence, with other demands. And basically, even today there is no understanding to be found for the language that another class speaks in each case, for one class. People have lost their understanding for one another when they are in different classes, because the deeper understanding for the human being with the knowledge-understanding, also with the understanding, with the interest in practical life, has been lost. Today, the practitioner is a routinier, he is not informed by ideas. Why? Because the education that the modern spirit of science has brought with it does not allow him to bring ideas into actual social life at all, but has to stop at technical life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, points to one of the greatest tasks of the present day, because if nothing could be contributed to the solution of this greatest task, then such a fate would have to be fulfilled by modern humanity, as Oswald Spengler, with an ingenious eye but an all the more ingenious error, developed from an insight into almost all of the sciences of the present day. It is painful enough that today we not only see this decline happening, but also that there are brilliant scholars, but also brilliant aberrations, who prove with the same rigorous scientific method that the development will lead to barbarism, just as any historical or scientific thing is rigorously proven today.

My dear attendees, it was the insight into these circumstances that led to what I have been calling for two decades “anthroposophically oriented spiritual science” receiving its special tasks from the catastrophic events of recent times, which have grown together with the great tasks of the present. I may refer to a few specific examples.

In the last few weeks of September and the first of October, we were able to hold a series of university courses at the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Thirty lecturers were involved in these university courses, thirty people who have emerged from modern specialized science. Lecturers who worked in the fields of mathematics, linguistics, history, law, psychology, philosophy, economics, practical life – I could list many more areas – and also in the most important areas of medicine, healing and so on. What should these university courses, which differ radically from everything else that is currently presented to the world as intellectual life, seek to demonstrate?

Yes, let us start from what many well-meaning people today have already formed as their view. They think it necessary to renew modern human consciousness out of the spirit; we cannot try to do it with economic and state matters alone. We must take hold of the thinking of humanity, we must take hold of the world view.

Yes, but what do they actually want? They want to take what has been cultivated in modern educational institutions, through popular educational institutions, through adult education centers, and through popular educational associations, and bring it to the broadest sections of the population. They want to be progressive in almost all areas, while remaining conservative in the actual field of ideas. For it is believed that what we have as a modern scientific spirit is good enough. But anyone who looks impartially at modern life must say to themselves: the circles in which this life, this modern scientific spirit, with all its results, even for the practical routine – for that is what it has become under its influence – has affected, they have also sailed into the modern world catastrophe. Do we believe that that which it did not protect from this catastrophe should now be blessed by spreading it throughout the world? The same spirit that caused harm, that was bound to cause harm among a few, would cause even greater harm among many. Therefore, in Dornach, within the spirit of this School of Spiritual Science, on an anthroposophical basis, we do not stand on the conservative ground that the spiritual life that exists in our educational institutions should simply be carried out into the world, but that out of a new spirit, out of a renewal of the spiritual life, the necessary spirit, the spirit of the future, should first be carried into the educational institutions themselves – only then will it be able to take hold of the people.

Now I can well understand how one can be skeptical about what underlies this consideration, what underlay the Dornach college courses: anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. But I believe that a large proportion of those who listened – and there were very many of them, especially from the German student body – that those who listened got the impression: This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not something that floats in a cloud cuckoo land of abstract ideas, but something that can have an effect on all branches of scientific, but also on all branches of practical life, which can transform the routine precisely in the field of practical life into reality imbued with ideas. One wants practical spirit in the spiritual life that is at stake.

Now it may seem absurd to modern people – I can understand that quite well, that it seems absurd to the old way of thinking – that something as intimate as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which I will describe in its basic features in a moment, should improve the impracticality of more recent times. People have simply become too accustomed to being caught up in routine, in uninspired practice. And they have become accustomed to letting theory be theory, because they basically only knew this theory as a sum of abstractions, and because they could not bring much more into practical life from what remained of the old Oriente as a worldview life than the first page in the account books, where it says “with God”. Whether there is a great deal of this attitude on the other pages, I leave to my contemporaries to judge more precisely.

What is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? My dear attendees, first of all, it should be mentioned that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not want to abandon the strictly scientific spirit that has asserted itself within modern civilization, but that, on the contrary, it wants to fully develop it. It is no coincidence that the name of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach is the Goetheanum. The Goethean attitude is to be cultivated, developed, formed further. Goethe already had many elements of this modern anthroposophical spirit. However, he had a feeling that whatever he asserted in the field of science, that everything one says and scientifically means about living beings, for example, must be justifiable before the strictest mathematical spirit; only someone who can conscientiously justify himself before the strictest mathematician can be considered a scientist. That is precisely what this spiritual science wants. But it wants to let that which otherwise only comes to light in mathematics as the last remnant of the ancient oriental world view arise from the human being in a more lively way. There are methods – you can find more details in my “Occult Science”, in “How to Know Higher Worlds” and other writings – there are methods by which the inner human soul life can be treated in such a way that it develops. I would like to illustrate this with the following:

Let us turn our attention to a child who is still imperfect, to a five-year-old child. We put a volume of lyrical poems by Goethe in front of this child. What will he do with it? It will probably tear up the booklet if it is a healthy child. It will have no relationship to what the little book actually means. Ten years later or fifteen years later, the child will already have a different relationship; it will be able to immerse itself in what the little book actually means. It is the same with people in later years of life. However, one must penetrate to an intellectual modesty if one wants to approach anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Intellectual modesty recognizes that, however old a person has become, they came to methodically develop their inner soul abilities. As I said, I have described the methods in the books mentioned and would just like to indicate that one can, through a particular deepening of the life of the imagination, through such a deepening of the life of the imagination, which, above all, arises from the will in the soul through meditation, that through such a treatment of the life of imagination, which I cannot describe in detail here, one can come to deepen certain forces in the human being that can otherwise be developed through ordinary education. And what I mean by intellectual modesty leads one to the conclusion that through what one develops simply through ordinary education, the world of one's surroundings and the world of the human being itself lies before one, as the Goethe book lies before the five-year-old child. One must develop the inner soul power to a higher level, then one learns to read the book of nature in a different way. Then one approaches this book of nature with different powers of the human soul.

What are these human soul abilities that one develops? In ordinary consciousness, as everyone knows, what we call memory plays an enormous role. We need this ability to remember. If it becomes even slightly ill, if only a small part of what we have in our memory is erased in the human soul, if there is a discontinuity of memory, then the soul suffers shipwreck. The illnesses that can occur as a result of this memory disorder are terrible. Memory is a force for normal theoretical and practical human life, but it can be further developed.

What is it, then, in our ordinary consciousness that makes us who we are in the present moment, in our very soul? After all, we are fundamentally what we are in every age of our lives through our memory. What we have experienced in life since childhood, what has settled in our innermost being, sometimes in the subconscious of our soul life, is what actually makes up our being in the present moment. And we look at this being by looking back from what we are at the present time, remembering what we have experienced since childhood. It is precisely this power, ladies and gentlemen, that can be developed to a higher level of knowledge.

Even today, very few people believe this. In this field, it is just as it was at the time of Copernicus, for example, when very few people believed what Copernicus said about world phenomena. Today, very few people still believe that by immersing oneself in certain ideas through meditation, by not surrendering, as is usually the case in the outer life, to the ordinary course of ideas, but by immersing oneself in ideas that one has first formed or that one has transmitted from a teacher, to remain absorbed in such ideas for years through strict, inwardly regulated exercises, exercises that are regulated like the laws of calculation, mathematics, geometry – few people believe that this can be achieved by strictly scientific methods, just as strictly scientific as work in a chemical laboratory. But it is possible that we can further develop the human capacity for memory through this; develop it in such a way that not only our present mental life appears to us as a result of our experiences and what we have experienced since our birth, but that our whole being appears to us, how it stands with its physical body in the world, how he has entered it through heredity with his physical body at birth, or rather at conception, into this physical world, is the result of events that preceded his conception, not only in the merely human, but within the whole cosmos. Just as one looks back through one's ordinary memory to one's life since childhood, so one learns to look back to something that lies outside this life between birth or conception and death. One learns to look back on what the human being was spiritually before he became physical. One gets to know the reality of spiritual life. One gets to know what the human being still carries within him today as something eternal, from which his cognitive, community and social life radiates, in his experience of a life before birth or conception. And one learns to answer a significant question: Why does such an insight into prenatal life, into the life of a human being in the spirit, appear so absurd to today's Western humanity? And one learns to recognize that the eternal part of the human being has only been cultivated on the other side through centuries, even millennia.

This was not the case during the heyday of worldviews in the Orient. This is how it became in the West. People wanted to speak to the soul life with human selfishness. And human egoism also influenced what was developed as a view of the eternal in man. As a result, no belief, no knowledge, no insight into the eternal was gained, because only the end of life that passes through the gate of death was considered. This is even expressed in outward appearances. We have a word “immortality”, we use it to point to what lies beyond death. But in our present language we have no word that expresses that this eternal was there before birth or conception, we have no word, such as unbirthliness, being unborn or the like as an ordinary word. We have no word that corresponds to the word immortality as the other side of life.

But then, when we use strict methods to develop that which in ordinary life only lives as memory into a [higher] faculty of knowledge, then knowledge becomes not mere belief, but insight, that which the human being has experienced before he was taken up into the hereditary stream of physical life through conception. This will one day become true science, as the Copernican and Keplerian worldviews became true science. But it will become science; it will not be mere belief. For belief arose precisely because people only looked at the afterlife, not at the prenatal life.

In order to be able to look at the prenatal, one cannot remain with the soul life as before; one must develop other powers. Knowledge of the higher worlds is not given as a grace; it is only attained through inner effort. But then what has been discovered about the eternal nature of man spreads like a light, and also to the natural world around us. Then all the laws of nature that we learn about will be imbued with spirit. Then we will no longer speak of a materialistic world of atoms, but of a spirit that also underlies nature and from which we are born.

So you see, in the field of knowledge, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science opens up a perspective on the question: What is the human being? It does not stop at the human being. It goes right to the heart of what is man's deepest yearning for knowledge in relation to his own nature. And that which has been drawn into the modern world as an observing spirit must, so to speak, deepen of its own accord when a person undergoes such inner soul exercises. When a person truly develops within themselves a higher faculty of knowledge that can look beyond birth into the spiritual world, their approach to external observation becomes quite different from that of mere natural science. In this natural science, we are proud, and I emphasize again: with full justification, to observe that in which we have as little human part as possible, where the human interior is not involved. But, my dear audience, anyone who, through the power of imagination, works on their soul in such a way that their ability to remember reaches a higher level, will also be directly encouraged to further develop the other powers of the soul, especially the will. If he does this, if he also develops the will higher under the constant onslaught of the cognitive faculty, as I have just shown in its higher development, then the relationship that we otherwise have to external nature becomes one of inner devotion. Then one does not remain on the surface and merely state material atoms that one invents and that are not found, but one grows together with what is inside things. Only now do we begin to understand Goethe's view, which he wanted to express when he used the words against Haller, which you are well aware of. Haller had said:

No created spirit can penetrate into the innermost part of nature.

Happy he to whom she only shows the outer shell.

And Goethe replied:

“Into the innermost part of nature” - Oh, you philistines —
“No created spirit can penetrate,"
you may mention such a word
only not to me and my brothers and sisters
. We think: place by place
we are within.
“Happy the one who sees
only the outer shell!"
I hear that repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively,
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly,
Nature has neither core nor
Shell,
She is everything at once;
She only tests you, most of all,
Whether you are core or shell.

This does not come naturally to man either. He must develop his will to a higher level. He must, so to speak, develop in his inner soul being that which is otherwise expressed as will emotions in his outer life. I can express myself in the following way: Our knowledge, namely our knowledge of nature, usually remains what we call objective, impersonal. But when we are in the midst of our ordinary lives, when we are with our friends, when we are dealing with our own destiny, with what we have to do in life, then we are bound to our surroundings with interest. Then our personal life wells up within us. Then we experience joy and pain, pleasure and suffering; in exaltation and in what we feel as depression, as despair, we experience something inwardly. On a higher level, just as objectively as anything else becomes objective in science, one can, if one [develops the will] through the methods I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, delve into the essence of things. With the innermost human being, one is, as it were, immersed in the interior of natural things. One does not, however, discover atoms, but spiritual realities, that which underlies natural phenomena as a spiritual, humanly related supporting force. And one now makes a special discovery in relation to cognition and willful penetration into nature. If one has trained one's memory to look at prenatal life, one notices that everything becomes dark and silent, unclear and uncomfortable if one does not stand on the same strict spirit of science as the external science.

My dear attendees, with mystical ramblings, with all that is expressed in popular theosophy, with all this enthusiasm and all this fantasy, one does not get along with what true spiritual research is. All this rambling mysticism only descends into ambiguity. With the spirit that one has first been educated in modern science, one must seek this development of the soul, as I have indicated. Only then does one understand how science continues into the human being.

But then, when one wants to enter into the inner being of nature through the development of willpower, one then realizes what one is missing if one does not develop it ever further and further. What is so very beautiful in ordinary life, but is influenced by selfishness, must be had; it must be had in the fullest sense if one wants to immerse oneself in the beings of the world through willpower. One must have love for all the beings around one. Anyone who cannot develop love, completely selfless love, the only passion of the human being that is free of selfishness – many a great mind has expressed itself precisely in relation to love – anyone who does not have this true love in their personality will notice how darkness and coldness confront them when they want to immerse themselves, to give themselves to the outer world, to outer nature, when they want to find the spirit in the external world. In this way, through the cultivation of the will, observation can be fathomed, which, due to the modern spirit of science, only remains on the surface. And when one fathoms observation by penetrating into what is to be observed, one learns to recognize yet another.

In the same way that the spirit of knowledge allows us to look at prenatal life, we now learn to look with a new spirit at what has developed since birth as our soul life. At first it takes on abstract forms, just as it appears to ordinary introspection, self-knowledge. But when we develop what I have characterized as immersion in the external world, as a deepened sense of observation, then we come to know what we are in every moment of our lives, what we are at the present moment, as the spiritual soul germ of the future. Then belief in immortality is transformed into the realization of immortality.

But what must be brought to the people if he is to develop this kind of knowledge? I have said that on the one hand, on the side of knowledge, the right spirit of science must be developed. But it does not stop, it does not stop at the human being. This spirit of science becomes a worldview. And we have to establish a science for the future that can be a worldview, just as the old orientalism had a worldview that was free of science. And we have to grasp anew from this science, which can be a worldview again, an experienced worldview, what the mystery of Golgotha, the mystery of Christianity, is. (This mystery of Golgotha is a fact.) It is a calumny when it is said here or there that anthroposophical spiritual science disregards Christianity. No, it is precisely cowardice when one wants to claim that Christianity has something to lose when a new spiritual stage of human development approaches this Christianity, approaches the facts of Christianity. Christianity is so great that it can endure all discoveries in the material and spiritual realms until the end of earthly days. And just as it was once believed that the Copernican spirit could put an end to Christianity, and just as they wanted to eradicate it, so too is this spiritual science being treated today. It is being vilified and they want to wipe it out. But it will not contribute to the belittlement of Christianity, but to its exaltation, in that it will make Christianity, the Mystery of Golgotha, comprehensible again to the modern spirit, to modern striving, as a spiritual event that gives meaning to the evolution of the earth. - That according to the side of knowledge.

And on the practical side of life, if we want to penetrate into observation that does not merely want to remain an observation of nature, we must develop the spirit of love. If we do not have love, it is not possible to deepen our external observation. We educate our scientific spirit by educating ourselves at the same time to become a spirit of love. This, however, gives us the opportunity to connect with things. That was the terribly tragic thing about the modern development of humanity: that in the modern spirit of science, man lived alienated from humanity on abstract heights, that he could not penetrate into practical life because he was also far removed from the spirit of nature itself. By penetrating into the spirit of nature and combining with scientific knowledge in the field of cognition, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science prepares for the coexistence with the reality of outer human life, the human community: the spiritual life of humanity, the legal or state life of humanity, the economic life of humanity. From the way we live with the objects of science, we learn to approach even the most practical external things, right down to the dexterity of the hand. From the routine workers, who only had the spirit of the educational institutions alongside them, which could not be practical because the modern spirit of science was just as I have explained it, a spirit-filled life practice will develop from this kind of modern routine. Then people will no longer say that spiritual life can only be an ideology, a construction based on economic processes, but will recognize how man has always been and must be, who also carries his spiritual life into his social community, who can only shape economic life if he has first educated himself in his spiritual life in such a way that he knows how to live together with reality.

This is what will be recognized more and more: that spiritual science is practical because it helps people to grow together with reality. Therefore, as a practitioner, as an economic practitioner, he will be immersed in reality. Just as one should not stop in the sense of this spiritual science before recognizing the human being, so too should one not, with this attitude, which cannot develop without spiritual science, stand before humanity as a labor leader or as a laborer in social life if one only understands the fundamentals.

People like Keynes demand that we do more than merely carry out the actions of statesmen. On the last pages of his book, this man, despairing of the present, says: What do we have to do in the near future? Spread the truth, destroy illusions, disperse hatred, educate people to live together. - Yes, my dear attendees, how do we do that? But this question cannot be answered by external measures, but only by pointing to the foundation of human life itself and its transformation in the present. What thoughts should we spread? Not those that led to the catastrophe. We should spread those thoughts that do not stop at the human being in the life of knowledge and in the social life. We will not destroy illusions if people [believe] that they can prove these illusions, especially those of social life, from the spirit of modern science. How are we to destroy the illusion that we are sailing into barbarism when someone like Spengler, who is truly brilliant, wants to prove that humanity will inevitably sail into barbarism in the third millennium? How are we to [disperse] hatred if we do not create the bridge, create the bridge in love between person and person, between all people, but in a love that is not preached but that is educated by the intellectual forces?

If science is only cold sobriety, only a cold spirit of science, and love is not also educated, then it will not be able to penetrate public life through any socialist theories, which are only the children of this spirit of science.

The fact that this modern anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not want to stop at what is theory is shown, first of all, in the one area where the great question of the time, the great task of the present, confronts us: in the field of education. The independent Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded in response to an impulse from Mr. Emil Molt, and is based on the spirit of anthroposophical spiritual science. It was founded not so much in order that the spirit of some abstract worldview might bring a new religious belief into this school, so that children might be educated in anthroposophy, as it were. Not at all. But something else is the case. Those who take up anthroposophy as a living reality in their soul life develop from it the practical tools of education and teaching; they develop a pedagogical art that is no longer connected with what led us into the catastrophe, but with what is longed for as the spirit of the future.

In the field of intellectual life, thanks to Emil Molt's creation, you have something that wants to develop the art of education out of the human being; out of that knowledge of the human being that can only flow from the soil of such a science, which does not stop short of recognizing and willing before the human being. In this way, what grows in the child from week to week can be developed in such a way that the human being presents himself as a being who can truly shape social life in love in practice, that routine is eradicated; that spirit-filled reality and spirit-filled practice are substituted for routine.

And, my dear attendees, when we see today what even well-meaning people intend to do in public life in the face of the great challenges of the time, well, on the one hand there is the revival of parliamentary life – this is not meant as a criticism of parliamentary life, which has its justification – but of that which has borne such fruit, of that economic life which has basically emerged only from the malformation of modern times. We see today how labor participation is introduced in the formation of large trusts, but this will lead to nothing different than national education would lead if it only came from today's educational institutions, where what is left of the old is proclaimed as a new gospel.

Just as I was driving to this lecture, I was given an essay by an English educator who had recently visited the Waldorf School in Stuttgart and become acquainted with what it aims to achieve. Strangely enough, he says: This Waldorf School does not present in its educational system the results of what has been called modern education up to now, but it presents a completely new educational art to the world. Through direct observation, this writer, who is himself an English lecturer, gained the following insight: he says: What is lived out in spiritual science, not in theories but through the art of education itself, shows that this spiritual science is not a confluence of abstract “pathways” — as he puts it — but it is that which, as a living thing, can flow into the shaping of humanity, into direct practical life.

Thus, with our Waldorf School, we have sought to achieve something practical in the spiritual realm, the one realm of the threefold social organism we are striving for, based on the spirit of anthroposophical spiritual science. And what has been achieved in one year, because the Waldorf School has only existed for so long, can of course only be a beginning. But you see, one recognizes in this beginning a new educational spirit, an educational spirit of the future.

Starting from this, this same man says: What is the essential thing here? The essential thing in this Waldorf School is that one cannot say - and he says that the teachers themselves, with whom he has spoken, admit this - that this is an ideal for all time that one only has to imitate. No, what comes from there can only come from spiritual science; it must always flow out of spiritual science in practical ways. And the man looked around further. He saw what other practical things had been dealt with. And it is a lot when it is said from this side of the world: spiritual science gives so many impulses that practical people can be educated for a very practical life in the future.

Spiritual science does not want to go crazy in some unrealistic cloud cuckoo land, but the great tasks of the present are such that they directly approach our most ordinary life. But spiritual science can also deal with this most ordinary life practice, even though it rises to the highest spiritual heights. And we may cherish the hope that what is already being seen in the spiritual realm by those who want to see it will also prove valid in some practical areas, and can prove valid more and more.

That is why the courses at the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach were held on the subject of reforming all of scientific life, because a transformation of thinking, of the whole world view, must be the starting point for anything that can contribute to solving the great questions posed by the present day.

And one will admit from the example that I have just given, but which could be multiplied by numerous others, that it means something when something is recognized by this spirit from abroad in today's world that we are doing in the middle of Germany.

My dear attendees, we must not forget the memory, the living and active memory of that which lived in Goethe and Schiller, the great Germans. We must develop it further. It was with this in mind that we built the Goetheanum in this border area that opens up to the West, to the victors in Switzerland, because we wanted to express the spirit in which even the most practical things should be created. And if we imbibe this attitude, then there will be more examples of the recognition of our achievements from the old German spirit, despite the spirit of the present civilization lying outside of Germany. Outwardly, we could be defeated. But what we will achieve if we remain true to the German spirit, to what is greatest in the German people, will be recognized. And spiritual science can already point to examples of how what is brought before the world today out of the truly German spirit is, after all, recognized.

In this way, spiritual science can also play a practical role in the recovery of national and international life, because it wants to be realistic in relation to all areas and therefore practical in the truest sense of life; it wants to be practical because it does not develop a practice that denies the spirit, does not strive for a spirit that is alien to reality, but because it strives for a true, genuine, eternal spirit, which, however, is not there merely for theoretical or confessional contemplation, but which is able to have an active influence on matter. A material life that does not deny the spirit, a spirit that does not feel too proud to conquer material life - that is what is connected with the great tasks of the present and the future. Thus we will have to solve the great tasks of the present and the near future in the sense of reconciling the true spirit with the material, also with the practical, with the economic life.

Dear attendees,

What arose out of anthroposophical spiritual science as the impulse for the threefold social order needs to be explained, not defended, time and again in the face of the view that the threefold social order is utopian. Anyone who really delves into my essay 'The Key Points of the Social Question' or into the wealth of literature that has since been written on it can see the fundamental difference between what is intended here, precisely on the basis of anthroposophy, and what is usually associated with utopias, utopian ideas in social, economic or other respects.

Otherwise, it is pointed out, and it is even taken for granted that it should be pointed out, how one or other institutions must be set up in order to lead to this or that satisfactory result or condition for humanity. The view of life that underlies the impulse for the threefold social order knows that, in the face of today's conditions, the assertion of any utopian ideas would be quite meaningless. Yes, I have stated in the new edition of my 'Key Points of the Social Question', which is just being published, in the rewritten preface, that I would not expect anything from any purely theoretical descriptions, however it should be in the future, even if these descriptions were to be written with the greatest of spirit. For today it is not at all a matter of expressing any ready-made, ingenious ideas about social institutions, but rather, today, in the face of humanity proud of its maturity, it is a matter of pointing out the opportunities under which, through social cooperation, people can bring about what is desirable. Thus, the impulse for the threefold social organism is not meant to characterize how the world should look, but how this social organism itself should bring people into certain mutual relationships so that people, according to their respective abilities and needs, create the conditions in which they can live in the future.

The idea is that the social organism should be structured not into three classes, but into three particular social entities, in each of which every person has a share. This structure should be into a free spiritual life, a state or political life and an independent economic life. And at the root of this lies the view that if people shape their circumstances through such a threefold social organism, then what is socially viable must come from the people themselves. So it is not a matter of presenting something utopian, but rather of characterizing opportunities under which people themselves, each individual, one might say, can gain influence over the social shaping of life that is commensurate with their abilities and needs and that must carry the necessary weight to bring about conditions that are conducive to life.

This is the fundamental difference between the impulse for the threefold social organism and, one might say, everything else that has understandably sprung up in our time out of the deep need of this time. But precisely this necessity, this basic principle, of peeling the social organism, which has become abstractly unified, into its three natural parts so that they can in turn work together all the more intimately, is still little understood in wider circles today. And that, my dear ladies and gentlemen, can on the one hand be found quite understandable, on the other hand it must be deeply regretted, because today we really do not have unlimited time to get out of the crisis and out of the decline, but because we need to get to the real spirit in spiritual, political and economic terms as soon as possible. But I said it is understandable. And one must consider the way in which it is understandable, in order to perhaps also find the way to improvement from it.

I would like to take as my starting point a judgment that has been made recently, not because it appears in a book by an economist, but because it is characteristic, despite being expressed by an individual here, of the way of thinking of the broadest circles - of the way of thinking that is precisely the sharpest obstacle to the intervention of such an impulse as that of threefolding.

It may be said that the economist and Jena professor Fritz Terhalle has written a very readable book about free and controlled price formation. The problem of price formation is, after all, the one that must be at the center of economic thinking. Terhalle sharply criticizes the price formation processes that took place during the war. It may be said that much of this writing is downright brilliantly illuminating what is actually present in current economic thinking. Terhalle asks what the benefits and effects were of the various price regulations that were issued by the state during the war. And I am allowed to share with you his four points, in which he summarizes his judgment. After he has presented in detail how the effects have shown, after again and again official bodies have issued price regulations, laws about prices – after he has examined these effects, carefully examined them, he summarizes his overall judgment in the following four points:

[First: Most of the time, the interested and relevant circles had a false conception of what should be striven for. Second: The uncertainty caused by this, as well as by the application to practice and by the practice of thoroughly opposing theoretical constructions, as well as, finally, by the most diverse jurisprudence, brought the participating circles of buyers into very undesirable confusion and agitation. Thirdly: The fight against price gouging was almost unsuccessful in some areas, particularly in primary production, and only partially successful in others, and often to an excessive extent, especially in some branches of retail trade.

And the fourth point, in which this economist sums up his judgment, is particularly characteristic. He says:

All these factors combined to damage the real business in favor of profiteering.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is how a man expresses himself who expressly wants to be scientific, who wants to scientifically examine the corresponding phenomena. And this is his scientific judgment of what the state did to regulate prices during the time of need.

But there is something else: the fact that this economist, from his scientific point of view, which he calls the national economic point of view – and one should believe that it is self-evident that economic demands must be judged from the national economic point of view – he states that from his scientific, national economic point of view, this way of the state influencing economic life is to be condemned. So he names these phenomena, which have come to light as a result of these state interventions, as those that he must fight from his scientific point of view. And then he says something quite extraordinarily characteristic. He says:

Yes, that is the [economic] judgment, but perhaps this [economic] judgment is one that must not be decisive, perhaps something more important, something more significant comes into question much, much more. And as such a more important, more significant factor, he cites the economic policy points of view, behind which what must be asserted from the economic point of view must recede.

So we are told that one can know that something is economically justified, but the economist must keep quiet, because anything that may come from one side or the other that is harmful from the point of view of economic policy must be put in its place.

Well, my dear attendees, one cannot resign more clearly from economic thinking than in this way. It cannot be stated more clearly that economic thinking cannot come into its own within the unified social organism of the state if those who feel professionally called to make this judgment say: This is our honest scientific conviction, but it must take a back seat to the state's economic policy measures. These are more important in the given case.

Do we not have a clear indication from the facts of life: economic life must be placed on its own ground; it is necessary that within the social organism this economic life be detached from that which it must damage when it places itself above it.

Those who today judge such things not from theoretical considerations but from full life practice, who in particular from life practice overlook the helplessness of people in these matters, can grasp with their hands how necessary it is to place economic life on its own healthy basis. And that this is only possible if, on the other hand, spiritual life is placed on its own basis, I have often stated here, and I will have to touch on it again in the further course of today's lecture. But I would still like to start from a remark that is made precisely by the side that I have characterized.

After the helplessness of economic thinking in the face of current social conditions has been admitted in this way, the emphasis is on what will actually matter in the future. And there Terhalle says:

In the future, it will be more important than ever to educate the masses about economic necessities so that they are able to think in economic terms.

It is remarkable that on the one hand the old unitary state is invoked as the higher authority, and then the demand is made not for some beautiful economic institutions – that is quite clever of Terhalle – but the demand is made that the people be taught about economic interrelations. And if you read on, this knowledge that the people should acquire about economic interrelationships extends even to the constitution of the market and market conditions. It is demanded that the people be enlightened in order to place themselves in the economic organism under the influence of this enlightenment in such a way that this economic organism can flourish. On the one hand, then, a remarkable judgment on economic policy, on the other hand, an appeal to the economic education of the people. And it is clearly recognized that it is precisely here, as a necessity, for the economic politician, the economist, that the economic actions themselves, that the whole economic behavior should change, so that people no longer how prices are determined, with a complete lack of knowledge about the structure of the market, about other economic relationships, but that each individual acts with economic enlightenment, and brings this economic enlightenment into the immediate economic activity itself. In abstracto, a very, very reasonable demand! But an important question arises from this whole context, my dear attendees, and that is this: where should this enlightenment about economic necessities come from in the future?

It is interesting that Terhalle quotes the socialist Richard Calwer with reference to a thought that the same expresses. He once said:

You need sufficient, well-founded knowledge of the goods in stock in order to be able to operate the economic supply in an appropriate manner; in other words, to arrive at appropriate economic pricing. You need knowledge of the goods in stock.

Yes, but how can this be applied? Where can it come from? And how can one educate the people with such knowledge of the supply of goods – and of course a lot of other things are necessary to educate the people about economic necessities – how can one educate the people with such knowledge?

You see, certain people, I might say, chew and chew on certain questions and get nowhere. These are the questions that the impulse for the threefold social order has envisaged in a concrete, appropriate, practical way. He started from the knowledge that a certain realization, a certain insight into economic conditions, into economic activity itself, must penetrate. But he does not declaim that such an enlightenment must be created, regardless of who is to create it. Nor does he declare that it should be created by the old unitary state. He also knows that this education must not be of a very specific kind, because an education of a certain kind, which such people probably always think of, would not be of any use at all. Because let us assume that the “clever” idea - I say “clever” in quotation marks, of course - of setting up state commissioners, state councils or whatever they are called, somehow expert councils, which, according to the known methods of today, by means of all kinds of statistics or the like, would gain knowledge of the constitution of economic conditions, and they would then, in the ways that are popular today, go among the people and create enlightenment, so that the people would then do business under the influence of this enlightenment - what would be achieved? Exactly the same would be achieved, my dear attendees, which in numerous places Terhalle criticizes with regard to the education that has always been created by the authorities during the war. There are many passages in his very interesting book in which he points out how all possible explanations, more as a sedative, were quickly thrown behind the people in rapid succession from all possible sources in the agitated times. But he states this not only for the reason, which was indeed also present, that people were so inundated with such explanations that they did not take them into account at all, but also for the other reason that such things have no effect at all when they are brought to the people in this way. Why don't they work? For the simple reason that such explanations only speak to the human mind, only speak to the human intellect, because such explanations have to be grasped with the head. And then, after what one has found reasonable, one would have to act accordingly. One would always have to say to oneself: “You must do what is reasonable!”

That is not the way to spread economic enlightenment. Oh no. This is how economic enlightenment is spread by abstract theorists who judge not by life but by their ideas about life; one could also say, by their illusions about life. Those who know what life is like have a different kind of enlightenment: an enlightenment built on the trust between the one who enlightens and the one who is to be enlightened. An enlightenment that does not speak in general terms, but in the individual, concrete terms that are currently present according to economic needs or economic circumstances, and that has an enlightening effect at the same time as action is taken. In other words, those who work together must be united in such a way that simply by meeting in economic action, one has an enlightening effect on the other. One is more familiar with the conditions of consumption in one area, the other with the conditions of production in another, depending on which branch of economic life he is more familiar with. If you know from life that he is in there, if you have other concrete connections with him in life, then you trust him and believe what he says. And in turn, he accommodates you with regard to what you yourself say, which he cannot know. And while you are communicating in this way, the economic actions are taking place. Economic enlightenment and economic activity do not fall apart, but by negotiating in a circle of trust, where producers and consumers, depending on the different circumstances, are drawn together, by negotiating in such a circle of trust, one clarifies oneself economically. One clarifies oneself within this circle. One clarifies oneself from the facts. Enlightenment is drawn into life. Enlightenment is not treated as something that is poured into the people from the outside. Because, my dear attendees, there can also be a social ethos in economic activity, because what is negotiated from person to person and is done in the negotiation is based on mutual trust, on such a trust that, in its potentization, may already be mentioned as real economic fraternity.

And this, my dear attendees, is the associative principle. The associative principle consists of nothing other than people who have some kind of economic interaction with each other joining together, associating, and the associations associating further. In this way, what is necessary for the maintenance of the economy comes about. In this way, what is effective in the economy itself comes about through direct knowledge of economic life.

Everywhere you can see that what underlies the threefold order is drawn from life itself. Only that this life is not looked at in terms of familiar illusions and illusionist theories, but in such a way that one looks at people, at people's perceptions and feelings, and above all, one asks oneself: how do people gain trust in each other? Imagine what it would mean if price regulations were to arise out of such a relationship of trust, instead of being dictated from outside. It should therefore not be said in any way that in order to arrive at a fair price, it must be done in such and such a way. Rather, it should be pointed out that if such associations exist and deal with pricing, then the corresponding prices will emerge from such a real economic life. It is not said that one should do it this way or that, but rather it is said: in this way people should join together, so that out of this union the things necessary arise, and so the other economic institutions, the other economic measures.

That is the reality of thinking about the threefold social organism. And I have often pointed this out, and I would just like to repeat it here briefly, that economic life has its own laws. The size of the associations arises automatically from the economic conditions of a territory. Associations that are too small would work too expensively, and associations that are too large would be unwieldy. I have explained this in more detail in the new preface to my “Key Points”. All the objections that are currently being raised against the associative principle disintegrate into nothing when one considers the real conditions. This associative principle alone will be able to meet the world-historical demands of social life in an appropriate way and to fulfill them. And how are these world-historical demands of social life expressed?

Now, my dear audience, the economic part of social life has actually only in the second half of the nineteenth century become what it is today. It is only from what became of the economic body of civilized humanity in the second half of the nineteenth century and has remained until our days, only from that could arise that which is nevertheless the main basis of our world war catastrophe, the economic confusion of the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century. How did it come about? We can say that if we take the immediately preceding signature of the economy of civilized humanity, then what we can call the world trade principle has gradually emerged from earlier forms of human coexistence. We can already speak of a world trade principle in the eighteenth century, and even more so in the first half of the nineteenth century. But what then emerged from the world trade principle in economic life is the world economy. And the world economy is something other than mere world trade and what it encompasses. A world economy is only present at the moment when different states exchange their production in such a way that what one obtains as raw products, the other processes in industry; that an economic production community arises between different state territories. Before that, it was essentially – always essentially, of course – the case that the states had closed national economies, that they traded their surpluses externally, and obtained from outside what they could not produce themselves. But the fact that a common working practice, as it was particularly brought about by the cotton industry – the characteristic example of what the world economy has created – spread across the whole of civilized humanity, is actually only a result of the very latest times. And one should not believe that what can be characterized as a world economy and what has established a far-reaching dependency of the individual national economies on each other, that this just hangs over humanity like a cloud.

No, dear attendees, what is happening in the world economy is affecting every single household. Every single person is finally under the influence of this world economy. But for this world economy, the earlier communities, which were aimed at something quite different, the unit states, were simply too small. They were also constituted in such a way that they were not geared to this mutual interdependence in the world economy. In short, the associations that existed in the past, which emerged from the household economy into the city economy, then into the state economy, became too small. Economic life went beyond what these associations could achieve. And finally, anyone who does not look at the surface of the phenomena, but who studies with all thoroughness the causes of the war between Central Europe and the western regions of the civilized world, knows that they arose from the breaking down of national borders by the world economy. And if you look at it that way, you have to seriously raise the question: How can we heal what the world economy, which is simply an historical necessity because of the spread of transport conditions and the possibilities it offers, has made unhealthy? The only way is to recognize that This economy and its institutions, which have arisen out of it, that one also asks about the state of mind, the whole ethos of the people who work within this world economy, how one can come out of this world economy itself to a shaping of economic life. The impulse for the threefold social order provides the answer: the kind of cooperation within the world economy that follows from it itself, not from the old institutions, is the associative principle in economic life. Now that the old associations, which came from something else and which coped with the old form of economic life, have been reduced to absurdity, the economy itself must give itself its associations. And these associations, as I have described them today more ethically, otherwise more economically, as they are also clearly characterized in my book “The Core Issues of the Social Question”, these associations, as they arise out of economic life itself, are demanded by the idea of the threefold social organism. And these associations can be created at any moment, without resorting to utopian dreams, if people in the economic sphere simply turn to themselves and thereby bring about the emancipation of economic life. When associations arise, they will initially only be able to do what the outside world allows them to do, but they will prove themselves in what they do, and then they will have to be allowed to exist, because they will prove fruitful for the economy.

But, my dear attendees, when you look at how the necessity for associations arises from the modern organization of the global economy, then on the other hand you have to ask yourself: how can that be brought about which must work in people who associate? Those people who want to work in associations that are built on trust must be able to inspire trust. This means that people must be able to place themselves in the world in such a way that this trust can work within the associations simply out of the whole human soul mood, out of the whole human soul condition. In other words, we need not only economically oriented associations; we need people in the associations who work socially, people whose social work is permeated by moral principles, by spiritual perspectives. That is why it is impossible to imagine any improvement in economic life without a simultaneous metamorphosis of intellectual life itself. For why, one might ask, do people today think, in a perfectly understandable way, that you can educate the people by simply pouring some kind of enlightenment from above down onto them? Why do people think this way? Because, under the spiritual development of the last few centuries, they have gradually become accustomed to the idea that everything that is reasonably thought must only have an effect on the intellect of the human being, must only take hold of the intellect of the human being. In order to show the right thing in this point, I have just pointed out in the lectures that preceded this one, in this week's lecture, but also in earlier lectures, what the most significant characteristic of spiritual science is.

The most significant characteristic of the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here is that it is drawn from such deep sources of human nature and being that, in turn, as it spreads, it must have an effect on the whole person, if this whole person is educated in such a way that he or she opens up to it. Spiritual science is characterized by its effect on the whole human being and its effect from the whole human being. And this is what we need on the other side. We cannot bring economic life up if we do not have people who stand firmly with both feet on this earth and who also receive the soul nourishment from spiritual life that allows them to stand with both feet on this earth. It is a commonly held opinion today that this spiritual nourishment can be obtained simply by spreading the kind of education that is cultivated under the roofs of our schools, in adult education associations, in public libraries and adult education colleges.

But let us look at an example – we must always look at things in concrete terms – of how today's intellectual education works precisely where it is supposed to have an effect on the human mind, where it seeks to take hold of the moral and spiritual content of the human being above all. Anthroposophy is thoroughly explored by the recently mentioned theologian Kurt Leese, who is a pastor; it says so on the title page. I don't know the man, I only know the book. So he is a pastor. He is one of those personalities of whom one would have to assume, within a healthy social organism, that when he speaks, something will resonate from his words that will pour into souls in such a way that the souls will feel within themselves the moral, spiritual and soul impulses that are within them. That people who receive this spiritual life become aware of what a human being actually is to them, what a human being is within the cosmic order that they see around them in the stars, the clouds, in lightning and thunder, in the succession of earthly and world-historical events. Just think what it means for human feeling, for the human soul, when one can say to oneself, from within the spiritual life, I am not only a forsaken child in a physical body, but I am something that has been born out of the whole physical and spiritual and spiritual universe. I belong to the universe in so far as this universe is eternal. Feel what happens in the soul when a person feels at home in the cosmos. This goes as far as the forces of the blood, which gives one the strength to act in life; this permeates and spiritualizes the will when one knows what one is as a human being in the universe. But this should come to him through the cultivation of spiritual life. Anthroposophy tries to give people such a spiritual life. But what does the pastor, licentiate of theology Kurt Leese, say? He says:

What is all this talk about the service of knowledge, about the riddles of life and their solution? What is all this surge of knowledge into the depths of the primeval world and into the distance when anthroposophy

- here it says: “theosophy” -

cannot say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego. And why, in fact, are seven world ages necessary?

And then this pastor and licentiate in theology says: the anthroposophist knows just as little about this as we do, so he also adheres to mere facticity.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, here we have the representative of the present-day spiritual life, and it is not just one person speaking, the individual can only be cited as one example, thousands and thousands are speaking, and they speak in the name of the spiritual life. They say: one cannot arrive at this, at this why it is better to be an I than a non-I, that is, to be in the eternal unconsciousness of the external natural existence.

In contrast to this, anthroposophical spiritual science emphasizes – this may emerge as a result of many lectures I have given here – anthroposophical spiritual science emphasizes what it means to become aware of how one stands in this universe. Let us just take our starting point for comparison from everyday life. We human beings in our everyday lives have gone through certain experiences since the time when we can remember back to our earliest childhood. We feel connected to these experiences. These experiences emerge in our memory as either friendly or painful. But what we bring up here is basically ourselves. We feel merged with what we have gone through in suffering and joy and what we can remember. We are aware that we are what has passed through us as pain and joy and then, through this passing, has been drawn into our soul. In our ordinary lives, we only become aware of something as a small human being by connecting with that which we have been connected with since our birth, that which has approached us and, in a sense, belongs to us. What does anthroposophy do? It expands, as it were, this sense of belonging together of the human being with the environment to the whole world, which can enter into his consciousness. As otherwise the human being only feels as one with his personal experiences, anthroposophy draws his attention to how he is connected in his being with the whole being of the world that can be perceived and experienced by him. The small consciousness of the personality expands into world consciousness. Together we grow with all the historical development of humanity, in that we recognize how we are always and again involved in it. We become one with the world. And in the same measure in which this consciousness of the world expands, this consciousness, which we otherwise have through our natural development with our experiences in suffering and joy, this consciousness, through which we also become participants in the suffering and joy of the whole world, by feeling ourselves as a human being as a member of the whole world, in the same measure in which this consciousness expands, in the same measure our consciousness of our humanity grows, and to the same extent we become stronger in this consciousness, our inner moral strength grows, because we know - although, and this is right, our sense of responsibility also grows - something grows in us through which we know that we are human within the world; through which we know what it means to be an I and not a non-I.

This awareness of what the human being is, of what he is in relation to the world and to all existence, this awareness, which, as we see and as we have tangible examples of, has been lost to the world in present-day spiritual life, this awareness is what spiritual science wants to bring back to people. And in the same measure that this consciousness, arising out of the knowledge of the spirit, which is to be imparted not as abstract knowledge but as knowledge that has been experienced, wells up out of the whole human being, in the same measure will our moral and spiritual strength grow. And what grows in us will find its way into the economic associations and assert itself as the basis for human interaction and the trust we need.

This, my dear audience, must be said if one is to describe how spiritual knowledge must take its place alongside economic demands. For the spiritual knowledge that we have today is expressed in such a way that it is indifferent whether one knows why one is an ego or a non-ego. We need a renewal in the field of spiritual knowledge. And this renewal will lead us to something quite different, which has already been hinted at in these or those lectures that I have given, which always seems bold when it is spoken out loud, but which is absolutely a result of this spiritual science, as surely as any scientific result can be.

Let us take what follows from the world view that is customary today. We look back into the distant past of our world system, when something arose out of some cosmic nebula and became what the world is in which we live. The sun and planets emerged from this nebula in a certain way, according to external natural forces. We live on this earth as lonely human beings, who feel the moral ideals sprouting up in their souls, which also signify the ultimate impulses of their social actions. They stand there with their moral ideals, which basically constitute their actual mental nervous strength as human beings; they stand there with them, and they know that without them they cannot be human in the full sense of the word.

But then again he looks up at what, according to the conventional world view, may be the end of this planetary system with our sun and our earth. What happens in our external world does not ask about our ideals, our moral and spiritual impulses. It proceeds according to external natural laws and arrives at a final state that signifies a kind of solidification, whether solidification into warmth or cold, it does not matter; it is then the charnel house at the same time, the great cemetery for all They emerged as illusions in the midst of this world-becoming, they gave man an illusory sense of his human dignity, and they will be carried to the grave with the planetary system itself.

The fact that many people do not admit to themselves that it is so does not change the fact that the present world view unconsciously flows into their feelings. And basically, it is also a saying like that one could never understand why it is better to be a self than a non-self, which arises from the desolate feeling that one must have when one sees this natural course of world events, with the spiritual and moral illusions of humanity right in the middle, giving people an illusory sense of their human dignity, but which they will one day have to carry to the grave with all of humanity.

This is countered, even if so many prejudices still speak against it today, by the view of spiritual science. I have often explained it here individually and will only describe it briefly today. Spiritual science also looks at the external world events from which the human being has emerged as a physical being. But then it recognizes that these world events, which are subject to natural laws, are in the whole, to our universe, the relative universe itself, as the plant, which sprouts in leaves, becomes a flower, develops the fruit casing to the germ inside. That which arises in the plant until the germ develops, what is the covering, passes away; the germ passes over, and the new plant life arises from it. The old covering must pass away so that the new plant life can arise from the germ.

Anthroposophy shows that everything that is physical in us, as belonging to the external physical world, belongs to such a transient part of the universe, but that a germ lives. That a germ lives in the human being, that is the spiritual, the moral of the impulses that live within. These are our moral ideals, they are a still young world. Just as the sheaths around the plant germ dry up and fall away, so will the visible stars, the visible external objects of the three natural kingdoms, fall away. They fall away. That which is the germ of the future lies in our moral soul content. The world of the future arises from this. What we do today, what we want today, becomes a real, outwardly perceptible world-forming force.

However, the sense of responsibility grows when one becomes aware that what we have in our moral intentions today will one day become as perceptible to the world as the stars are perceptible to us today. But many a word that has been said in religious documents only makes sense when one is aware of what flows from a real knowledge of the spirit. One must always remember with elevated feelings that it was once said in a particularly paradigmatic way that what lives in man as ideals and pours out into words is the creative [germ] for future worlds, to which those who are now present as external nature will not be added; they will no longer be there when new worlds have arisen from our moral ideals. “Heaven and Earth will pass away,” said the founder of Christianity, ‘but my words will not pass away.’ That means: They will be worlds when the world of heaven and earth, which one now sees with eyes, will have passed away.

This is the anticipation of a spiritual scientific truth, my dear attendees. And if we are so connected with the becoming of the world through our moral ideals, then our consciousness of our true nature as human beings also grows. In turn, we have to draw from spiritual science itself moral forces, which then become social forces.

Spiritual science does not merely theorize, spiritual science does not merely present abstract teachings, spiritual science presents something into the world that becomes strength in the human soul. And strength, ladies and gentlemen, is what we need if we want to become social human beings. For strong, morally social people must place themselves in the associations. That is what it is about.

In what I have just said, however, there is something that may appear to today's scientists to be somewhat lay and very amateurish. That is why I was also taught, when I recently expressed the same thing in Zurich, by a Zurich private lecturer, that I “reify” my ideas in this and other areas, as he said. Now, he speaks of this reification as if I were speaking of ideas as realities. Of course, he has no idea how the things are meant. He speaks of this reification very dismissively and says that I would even have claimed:

In his two lectures, Steiner literally says:

- he says explicitly, and now he wants to quote words because this seems to him to be something outrageous - I would have taken it so far in reifying that I would have said:

“Anthroposophical spiritual science recognizes the moral as being just as real as the physical. In our moral life, it recognizes indestructible seeds for emerging later worlds.”

You see, this ruler of contemporary science makes the logical mistake of reifying ideas when, from the basis of real spiritual research, he presents the truth that, not through logical error but through the great, very promising world processes for humanity, the moral ideas that we carry within us become reified, become things, become realities. Today, you are already criticized if you dare to claim - then it is put in quotation marks - that anthroposophical spiritual science recognizes the moral life as an indestructible germ for future worlds, for everything physical. You are not allowed to do that from the point of view of today's, correct university philosophies, because you are scolded as someone who understands nothing about the world.

Because the one who understands something about the world, in the opinion of these people, cannot judge otherwise than that the world has arisen out of a fog according to real laws, that it runs according to mere external physical laws and falls back into the sun as slag, while the non-reified moral impulses, which resemble mere ideas, must be buried in the same world churchyard.

But, my dear attendees, if economic life is to recover, if economic demands are to be taken seriously, then this cannot happen without

at the same time the spiritual knowledge, which places the moral and thus also the religious life alongside the economic. For the economic associations will give rise to the living insight that others also demand, but do not know where to get. And from that which is spiritual knowledge will come the social ethos, the socio-ethical power to bring these insights into reality. This is what we must bear in mind when we speak of economic demands today. We cannot seriously speak of them without at the same time pointing out what can give people the strength to fulfill these economic demands.

But, esteemed attendees, how did it come about that people in the spiritual life are already saying that one cannot know why it is better to be an I than a non-I? Even if it is unpleasant to say so, it must be said: the one who gets the drive for his spiritual work only from what the economy alone, what the state can give, which puts the individual in a certain place, the one who must succumb to this drive because it has become has become a vital necessity, he, no matter how strongly he may be an idealist as an individual, may even be a spiritualist, but he is increasingly coming to regard the spirit as no more than a mere appendage of life. Then the final consequence is this, which has become a ruling one in the broadest circles of our socialists, that the spiritual life is only an ideology, something that arises as if out of a haze and fog from the only reality, the external, material, economic reality.

That this view prevails today in broader socialist circles, that this view also dominates feelings, emotions and impulses in these circles, is only because the ruling, leading circles, through centuries, have lost direct contact with the real spiritual world; with that spiritual world in which we speak not only of the spirit as a sum of abstract concepts, but as a reality, as we speak of the physical-sensory reality. This spiritual life, which recognizes the spirit in its reality, must unfold freely and independently, emancipated from state and economic life; it must be left to its own devices. For the longer the spiritual life is dependent on any external factors, the more the consciousness of the substantial, independent spirit that weaves and pulses and works and lives through the world is lost. Spiritual knowledge can only exist within a free spiritual life. And this free spiritual life will also be the source of real spiritual knowledge. From this real spiritual knowledge, the strength will flow into the economic interrelations that we need to make progress in economic life as well.

So, my dear attendees, everything that is contained in the impulse for the threefold social order flows from a truly real contemplation of life. So everything is meant to be directly practical, but in such a way that by the practical view we do not just mean the narrow view that looks at the machines and at the length of the working day, but at the whole human being, who wants to and will give us head and heart and mind and feelings, and that will bring them to us when we approach them in such economic and spiritual contexts that trust is the element of life and brotherly love as the highest effect of this connection is the atmosphere of life in these contexts.

This must be emphasized again and again, especially in the face of the numerous misrepresentations that are made today about anthroposophical spiritual science as it is meant here. It must not be said of this spiritual science that it has no place in practical life. On the contrary, it is the science that can be said, as I said here a few days ago, to be that which does not seek to elevate the soul to a mystical, unworldly existence, to a mystical cloud-cuckoo-land. Rather, it is that which is intended to fill the soul with spirit in such a way that this spirit feels strong enough to carry spiritual substance into material life. The mystic should not become unworldly in an egoistic way, seeking refuge somewhere where the world is not to be found. He should be imbued with the spirit so that he can carry this spirit into the world around him, which is a free spiritual world, a democratically equal world, an economic world built on trust, an outwardly material world. It is precisely through spiritual science that the realization must penetrate that it is the most blatant, most sophisticated selfishness to take refuge in a world-unrelated mysticism, to cry out for asceticism, while a truly spiritual penetration should precisely give the strength for life. This strength for life, it alone can lead us out of the impending decline, out of the terrible distress and misery, towards a task.

Then in the middle is the actual state life, which will develop when, on the one hand, the free economic life and, on the other, the free spiritual life are established.

In this way, the threefold social order will be created.

Then, in the middle, there will be the actual life of the state, which will develop when, on the one hand, free economic life and, on the other, free spiritual life are separated.

In this way, the threefold social organism will be able to shape the necessary social order of the future in a way that is full of life.

Sometimes today one hears the judgment, at least ten times, and that always only reminds me of how widespread it is: What will become of the state, of legal life in the middle, if intellectual life and economic life are separated? A famous Swiss legal scholar, the most important legal teacher in Switzerland and at the present time, said this himself when he became acquainted with the threefold social order. He said that he found the threefold order appealing, but he could not understand what would then remain for the state between economic life and the life of the humanities.

Now, my dear attendees, it will be shown that a great deal will remain for a powerful and vigorous state life and that those who judge things according to today's conditions just do not see what will remain remain, because, to a certain extent, what is supposed to be there in the life of the state, built on the same democratic foundations, has been consumed on the one hand by economic life, and it wants to consume it even more where the last consequences are to be drawn from this principle. People who say that the economic-political is a higher point of view than the actual economic one do not usually see this. They do not see that the final consequence of such views is the terrible, world-murdering Bolshevism that follows from them. They will see this gradually, if they do not force themselves to form a reasonable view.

In this way, the life of the state and of the law will stand in the middle, and economic life will be built up on its own forces, while spiritual life will stand free and independent. It is as a social shaping of these forces that the impulse for threefolding wants to work. For he must say, not in some programmatic way, not out of abstract thoughts, but out of a thorough penetration of the real necessities of the present, that only on the foundations, which he can perhaps still only express in an imperfect way today - I fully admit this - but which must be further developed through the collaboration, the very necessary collaboration of a great many knowledgeable personalities. In this qualification, however, those who today feel they are the bearers of this impulse for the threefold social organism are convinced: if social life with its longings for a future design is studied and observed in this thorough way, and if these longings are met with the appropriate measures, then what makes the social organism possible must arise. For in such a social organism there will be the basis for the possibility of life; there will be a truly invigorating and fruitful spiritual life that will bring forth a healthy economic life built on brotherhood. There will be in such a social structure a truly free spirit in an economic order built on trust as the only possible social economic force.

It is quite conceivable that some people find a topic like the one to be discussed today fruitless and perhaps even impossible to discuss because they believe that nothing fruitful can be created from such foundations, from foundations of social knowledge and social insight, in the face of facts.

Now, my dear attendees, the great catastrophe that befell our entire civilized world in the second decade of the twentieth century could well teach people the necessity of facing the latest development of civilization in order to perhaps come to a different insight than the one I have just characterized in my introduction. What has taken place in the civilized world during the last decades, the last 70 to 80 years, is precisely the failure to take into account the emerging social situation of humanity. If you look back over this period, you will find that precisely those personalities who belonged to the leading classes have, as fate has brought them, entered into some situation, into some professional or creative situation, and that they have worked in this situation in the way that circumstances have dictated for a long time, without taking into account whether it is necessary was necessary to look into these conditions, to intervene in these conditions themselves, one accepted what was offered without much ado, which then resulted in the great and powerful progress and triumph of modern civilization, and one left it to the broad masses of the working population, the proletariat, to criticize out of one-sidedness what had emerged from social conditions. The inconvenience of having to intervene gave rise in the leading classes to a certain desire to basically let things go as they were going under the influence of the rapidly developing production conditions, and those who exercised criticism were caught up in the wheels of social conditions; their unfruitfulness was evident in many areas. If we reflect on how we have failed, for a long time, to maintain an overview of what actually needs to be done, and on how circumstances today demand a different way of thinking, a different way of feeling about people than in the past, then one will surely come to the realization that now, when the time of the terrible catastrophe has come, that now one must begin with such a rethinking, such a re-sensing; that should be clear to anyone who is unbiased. At least in the West, the circumstances that caused 12 to 15 million people to go mad and as many to become cripples arose from impossible economic conditions. This is undoubtedly the case in the West, but in the East we have completely different civilization conditions, where psychological factors have played a greater role. It should be clear to everyone that this whole chaos, the state of war and the current crisis, has arisen from the sins of omission of the last decades.

We have the peace treaties. But ultimately, is the peace that has been made a real peace? It could only be a peace of significance if it offered the prospect of the old civilization of humanity being rebuilt. But let us look at the actual circumstances and see if they support this. In England, it dawned on people first, and in a very significant way. English thinkers have said many things about the bleakness of the current situation and what is needed to improve it.

Then, in October [1920], at the Second National Economic Conference, we heard it said that what had emerged from the war catastrophe was alarming and that it must be replaced by something else if the misery was not to grow ever greater. There were many men there who realized what the situation was really like.

We in our civilization today are like a person who takes comfort in the fact that he still has a coat that is just starting to get shabby, and so on. [Lücke in der Mitschrift?] So steht [es] mit demjenigen, was man als die Besserung ansieht. Es ist durchaus diese Besserung nur scheinbar, denn dasjenige, was geblieben ist aus der Zivilisation der Vorkriegsepoche, ist in einer gewissen Beziehung abgetragen, muss in furchtbare Zustände hineinführen, wenn nicht beizeiten daran gedacht wird, wirkliche Besserung zu schaffen.

A significant word rings in one's ears when one hears how a conscientious person has described the present situation, with the words: “Within the present conditions of European civilization, a great crime of an incomparable kind is being committed and we are all participants in this crime.” The word has been spoken in England, and one may say that such a word sounds in one's ears as something that seems quite true. Those people who reflect on the present conditions are struck first by the economic conditions, and one thinks, this gentleman will become master. One believes that one can master them in this or that way, and then it will spread to all other areas of civilization. However, within the economic conditions there are circumstances that easily, very easily show how, basically, it is not managed from some reasonable foundations, but from chaos, from a situation riddled with decay. Can it be called rationing at all when, for example, Switzerland, which needed a million tons of coal in the first half of 1920, obtained 4,000 tons of that million tons from America? One need only consider that Switzerland is surrounded by coal-producing countries and that it is an impossible way to manage the world when things are supplied as expensively as possible. Hundreds of such examples could be cited today; one could see the impulse from which economic efficiency actually flows. - About 4500 million pounds sterling are needed for reparations, etc. [gap in the transcript?]

All of this provides a horrifying overview, and one should not believe that any area, such as Switzerland, can be exempted from the consequences. It is now definitely the time, even if one resists it, in which the progress of civilization makes the world economy necessary.

If we also consider that these Central European countries, if they are to have any chance of working at all, need at least 100 million pounds sterling in credit, then the prospect before us will be a very sad one indeed. The economic situation is before our eyes; [from the same side] from which the economic situation is already clearly emphasized, something else also emerges. One could hear it in the conference of October 1920. Basically, it could not have turned out differently, because those who were gathered were diplomats, they were politicians all together, they all understood nothing of a national economy; it is necessary that economists offer their hand out of the economic conditions to improve them, to intervene in the improvement. Today it is admitted that the politicians, those who are only politically trained - and unfortunately they are poorly trained politically enough - are not at all in a position to intervene in the economic situation in any way that would improve it.

You see, my esteemed audience, the views that are finally being imposed by the necessities of the times on the few today, are the ones that want to put the threefold social organism into the world as an impulse to lead to ascent. It wants to take civilization as a whole, it wants to see how the various factors, the various elements of civilized life interact. We cannot look at economic life in isolation; we can only look at the whole, but then it shows us very clearly how radically different the individual areas are, and it is on this radical difference between the three areas of civilization that the threefold order of the social organism focuses, and from there it tries to contribute to the recovery of human development. These three areas are spiritual life on the one hand, economic life on the other, and in the middle of them we find what we can call state, legal or, in fact, political life.

When the newer life of civilization began, it was quite natural, indeed historically necessary, that what had developed out of the modern state should gradually take hold not only of political and legal life, but also of intellectual life, of education, teaching and the whole intellectual life. But today we are in an age where this has fulfilled its task and must make way for something different. It is absolutely the case that the forms of civilization are first young, then mature, and then grow old and decay. So the deepest cause of our current plight is actually that we do not realize that we are living in an abstract unitary state, that this is actually heading towards its [doom] period, and that something new must be born to take its place.

The goal is to carve out intellectual life and economic life from state life, so that three elements take the place of the abstract unitary state, which has confused everything: an independent state life with its own legal system, an independent intellectual life, and an independent economic life, which must and can grow and flourish under these conditions. The nature of an independent spiritual life must be such that the greatest possible development can take place of that which man brings with him into physical existence through his birth, whether it be spiritual or mental. That which is to be developed must be introduced into the other areas of life with the greatest strength, and it must be allowed to unfold completely freely.

In more recent times, the state has taken control of education and teaching; it has done its part – what has come of it? Those who are supposed to develop human abilities in teaching and education have found themselves dependent on what the state prescribed for them; in a sense, they were what the state needed for its enrichment, for fertility. But because the actual life in education and teaching was guided from outside, the content of teaching became alienated to what we see today – especially viewed by certain personalities – to an abstract scientificity, to an abstract intellectual life. These educators of humanity were unable to administer the teaching and education from their own hearts at the same time; so they had no choice but to live in an abstractness. The fact that many people do not want to admit this is the cause of our present misery.

What can help is spiritual life. The most important component of spiritual life is independence, spiritual self-reliance. May this come into its own administration, and into the power of those who are directly involved in education and teaching. Here we must strive to ensure that they can also administer this educational system freely and autonomously in their corporations and in their cooperation, so that we need not fear anything that arises from the educational system itself. Forced authorities are fought against. Anyone who is familiar with the conditions of intellectual life knows that a specialist naturally has the greatest influence because others need him in order to learn from him. Independence is what matters. Of course, the establishment of intellectual life is developed out of economic life. But in terms of the spiritual, this intellectual field must be completely independent of any other influence.

For millions of people, intellectual life has become an ideology. But you can't come to such a view if you experience that the spirit is not just something you have thought about, but something you have experienced; from this living life flows the state of the heart as it actually is. One hears quite justified statements that in recent times intellectual life has in a sense brought itself into a state of decadence, even brutalized, because it has striven for pure intellectualism, while the soul, the heart, has actually withered.

It is easy to say such things, but it is more difficult to see how one can follow suit. One can demand that the atmosphere of emotional education should be abandoned, etc. [gap in the transcript?] But one cannot simply draw a line under what has gone before. Modern life has its techniques, it has cultivated the intellect, the development of the mind, one-sided cleverness. The task is to direct the serious, profound question to the destiny of the human being: What brings harmony with the development of the heart and soul? ... (reference to spiritual science).

Such a science cannot be like it used to be, considering that the great task that one wants to set oneself there is to come to the spirit, to the true spirit; not to spiritualism, to theosophy, etc., but to a spirit that can permeate the whole human being, that can reconcile spirit with feeling. This is what has been seen in reality, and what now wants to happen from within, to enliven this spiritual life from the Goetheanum in Dornach. However, this does give rise to many annoyances for Dornach, because it has to take a stand on other contemporary endeavors that may come from good intentions but prove to be unfruitful. What do people strive for most in our time to strengthen the life of the mind, the life of morality, the deepening of religion? What is being striven for there? One wants to spread what one has acquired intellectually through all kinds of enterprises, such as public libraries, etc. — Dornach cannot go along with this because it recognizes the futility.

One must ask oneself: Did those who were leaders not see and know what the schools had achieved, did they not possess precisely what is taught at the universities? But did that prevent them from sailing headlong into the catastrophe of the twentieth century? And if those who were in possession of this education were not protected from it, but were also driven into it, can one hope that it will lead to something different when it is spread further? Do we want to deliver that to the millions as well, so that it will bear fruit to an even more devastating extent? This is what is being seen through in the field in Dornach, in order to carry it out to the people from there. First of all, it must be carried into the educational institutions, so that something different can come of it.

I just wanted to mention the reasons why this understanding of the necessity for the liberation of spiritual life can arise. It is precisely from this that the demand for a free spiritual life arises. Teachers from the lowest to the highest classes have to administer this spiritual life themselves; they themselves will have to set up the practical teaching institutions that exist; they will not be told what to teach, because it is said that they themselves must administer what is to be used in spiritual life. But then they are also forced to immerse themselves in practical life, to teach and educate, because they do not have to teach an abstract science, but rather that which really sustains life.

The free spiritual life must stand on one wing of the social organism. On this one wing of the social organism, it will be necessary to judge things for ourselves by putting ourselves in the place of the spirit. This will cause difficulties because people are unaccustomed to grasping such a spiritual life correctly; they only have a mere thinking about the spirit. But we cannot make a decision about whether to leave it or improve it; it must be understood that in this way life is fertilized in the right way from the spiritual side - it must become independent. That is on the one wing.

On the other wing is economic life. I would like to show you, by means of an external comparison, the difference between the living conditions in economic life and in spiritual life. (Example) In the economic sphere, the freedom that we have in spiritual life is not possible. In economic life, we are all, without exception, dependent on each other. In economic life, it is a matter of gradually acquiring what one has acquired through economic experience, through being connected to an economic sector. In the field of economic life, it is impossible to start from freedom. It can be strictly proved that it is impossible. (Example: the negotiations that have been conducted regarding the introduction of the gold standard.)

The opposite of what the clever people preached has occurred. What has emerged on a large scale in the global economy is now emerging on a small scale in the present day. As a rule, they will have the opposite effect on the economy as a whole and thus on economic life in general. In this regard, we need to take a somewhat unbiased look.

In earlier [decades and] years, we have the emergence of the social question. In this regard, quite clever people have also had strange thoughts. (Austrian minister M.) In the 80s, I had many a conversation with people from the business world. It was precisely in this area that people were the last to notice the pressure and the social unrest that had brought such misery and hardship. But those who were involved in the conversation said: We are powerless to intervene productively in economic life, etc. These things were simply accepted as an uncertain fate. Today, these things must be thought about on a large scale.

In the field of economic life, the most important thing is the price; because only when prices are such that people can exchange their things, then social life is truly present in a human way. Now it is very easy to say, with mathematical certainty, what must be the case with regard to [a] determination of prices, the original cell of economic life, and that is called: The person who produces something must receive so much for this production that he can maintain himself and those who belong to him, himself and his own, until he can produce the same product again (example: boots). This is, as I said, expressed in the abstract. It must be obvious; it is only a question of how this can be achieved in the reality of life. What must intervene here, and this must be taken very seriously, is that the individual human being can come to an economic judgment. The aim is for everyone to be able to work productively in a single field. Therefore, something must arise that leads to active participation in economic life and sets the living in motion. What I have called the “core of the social question” must come into being: the principle of association in economic life. (By way of explanation, an example from my own life.) Books are written, etc., sent to the printers, typeset, printed and shipped, with a great deal going to waste. Consider what that means! It means nothing other than that so many hands have been involved in producing the paper, typesetting, printing and so on. That is unnecessary work. (Example: publishing house, consumer economy.) Such examples point to what I have described in terms of my core points under the principle of association. The point is that those who participate in economic life – and that includes all people – join together, and that in itself results in an association. The individuals join together according to production and this with the consumer circles. Consuming, producing, if you take all this into account, you get very specific groups of this association. (World Economic Federation.) Within this economic association, negotiations take place from person to person, and that is where it comes about that people contribute everything they can; what they cannot do is supplemented by others.

If it is considered that price conditions are the decisive factor, it must be possible to intervene in this pricing; this cannot be done by theoretical decrees. The point is that it must be started from the other side. It cannot be regulated by decrees, but only by the living life, it can only be achieved by the associative economic life, which should be based on sound economic experience.

Neither in the intellectual nor in the economic life can parliamentarization be imposed, because only those who are knowledgeable and competent in both fields can act. Therefore, it must be negotiated from person to person, from corporation to corporation, so that the one who has experience is placed in the relevant position because he has experience, not because he is placed in a party that he does not represent, so that expertise and professional competence can be brought to bear.

There will be many objections. But these objections are overcome when one considers that, for example, only those who need a mild amount of freedom to pursue their profession might feel harassed by the associations. But when the matter is put into practice, it is no more difficult than exchanging money. (Bureaucracy removed.) These things are treated in a lively way, and so they can also be handled in a lively way. But what is meant by the associations would precisely free the human being, and then the other liberations in other areas would follow. (Applied in Stuttgart.)

One might object: on the one hand we have the spiritual life and on the other the economic life, so there is nothing left in the middle. We just have to wait and see what happens in the middle; there is a large, larger area there; humanity demands from its essence the decision from itself, from this middle. (Unification of people who have come of age, standardization of goods, time, and measure.) These things, which affect people themselves and for which people must stand up with their person – they must not become commodities. In economic life, one must accept what nature offers and manage accordingly; therefore, it must be independent of the state.

Much else will belong to it; we shall see what living right is. That which ought to arise there is not really there; the actual legal life has been corrupted. That which ought to be right, which only flows from people who have come of age, has withered away. People must have the opportunity to find an area where they can determine what lies in the judgment of mature people; one must not be afraid of it. (Quotation of an article from a newspaper.) Such a man cannot imagine that precisely because it is justified in the right way, these three limbs of the social organism come together to form a unity. It is the same in man; the unity, the living unity in man also consists of a threefold structure, and so it must be in the social organism. A man once objected: Yes, life must be a unity, and you cannot think of it differently, as a unified state; everything must go together. (Example: rural economy, women, servants, children, a number of carts working together in unity.) The unity comes about precisely because everyone does their part. We have seen that very enlightened people say: the people who put together this seemingly new form were politicians who understood nothing about economic life.

We just don't have the courage to face up to what people long for, to develop the impulse of will. We have to relearn. The great significant ideals, freedom, equality and fraternity, have so far not been able to lead people out of the chaos of the times. Very clever people have proved again and again how freedom and equality can exist, and how fraternity is affected by both. Freedom can be attained in the realm of spiritual life; equality will arise out of state life; and fraternity can be developed in economic life, genuine, practical fraternity. Thus one will have to say: by recognizing how these three great, significant ideals must flow into life, humanity will be led out of the terrible chaos through the threefold social order, if it is understood in the right way. Based on the feeling of the bitter need of the time and on decades of experience, it can be said that this threefold social order aims to lead humanity out of chaos by not forcing anything together, but by introducing these three ideals into their proper possessions, into a large social organism. And this viable organism will bring together what can arise: freedom in spiritual life, equality in legal life, fraternity in economic life.

Dear attendees! When I published my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and the Near Future” in the spring of 1919, the public life of the West was somewhat different from what it is today. It should actually be made perfectly clear how fast the pace of current events is. We should realize how much the configuration of Western civilization has changed again in the last two years. In the spring of 1919, there was sufficient reason to hope that a sufficiently large number of people would unite in the belief that spiritual impulses could counteract the forces of social decline. The terrible experiences of the war years lay behind the Western world's humanity. These terrible experiences, which at the time many people felt were incomparable in the historical life of humanity. And from these terrible experiences had emerged the opinion that something very drastic had to be done, something that had to be brought about from the depths of intellectual life, so that the forces of decline could be paralyzed in an appropriate way and humanity could be brought out of the rising forces through work.

One would like to say: After only a few months, one could see that this opinion, which was very much present in the broadest circles, had actually receded considerably. Therefore, in February, March, April and May of 1919, one could have believed that by asserting such ideas, as they were presented in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and as they were summarized in my appeal “To the German People and to the World of Culture,” one could have believed that by putting forward such ideas one could reach those people who held the opinion just characterized. It was not necessary to cherish the arrogant opinion that the right ideas had been hit upon if they were put forward in this way. It was enough to believe that the ideas had been honestly drawn from the depths of existence, from the legitimate depths of of existence, such ideas had been brought up, and then one could believe that from the experiences that had just arisen, a sufficiently large number of people would be found to support the whole ductus, the whole will of such ideas, with understanding and energy.

One could see how very soon people again believed that humanity would be helped by first gluing together these or those old impulses that had been torn apart. One could see how the energy that had been noticeable for a while back then was gradually paralyzed and so on. At that time, in the spring of 1919, what I called “The Threefold Social Organism” had to be thrown into the situation, as it were. As I said, it might need to be corrected, as always, but it had to be thrown into the situation because it arose out of two presuppositions.

The first prerequisite is an historical one, a spiritual-historical one, one that is gained from observing the course of human development as it emerges from the spiritual-historical observation that is carried out here as anthroposophical.

The other prerequisite arose from decades of observation of the impulses that were striving from the undergrounds of spiritual, state-political and economic life everywhere towards the surface. The second prerequisite arose from the observation of what actually wanted to be realized, to which one should only help to realize, from this observation, from the directly practical observation of the three different formations of life. The first premise was not theoretical either. The purpose of spiritual science, as it is here, is to lead to full reality. Therefore, all its considerations, including those on the development of humanity, are imbued with a sense of reality. Who could not recognize the democratic principle by an unbiased observation of that which has asserted itself more and more intensely in the emergence of modern humanity?

I do not need to define this democratic principle. Of course, one person understands one thing by it and another person something else. But in general, one has a sense of what has been emerging in recent history as the democratic principle, the principle that man, simply by being man, must assert within the social community, that as much as the judgment of the individual human being is worth, this judgment must also mean in social events. This urge for democracy had been there for a long time, expressed through the most diverse movements and convulsions of the newer historical life of Western humanity, with its American offshoot.

But on the other hand, it could be seen that this democratic life cannot actually be realized in all respects. And it becomes apparent to the unbiased observer of human society that there is only one area of social life that can truly become democratic, and that is the political-state area. But the political-state area, if it wants to become democratic, can only include those matters on which every person who has come of age is capable of judgment. And if you think practically, you can clearly define the area of social life that can be subject to the judgment of every person who has come of age. On the other hand, there are two areas that simply cannot be democratized because they can only develop if they develop in terms of the expertise and specialist knowledge of the people, of the individual human individuality. This is, on the one hand, the entire area of intellectual life, namely that area of intellectual life that is actually public, the area of teaching and education, and, on the other hand, that of economic life.

Spiritual life and its main component, the system of teaching and education, can only develop properly if it arises from the professional judgment and expertise of the individuals active in this field and is also administered, administered in complete independence. Not every person who has come of age can judge in this area. Therefore, in this area there can be no such thing as a democratic constitution and democratic administration. Nor can there be democratic constitution and democratic administration in the field of economic life.

In this connection I should like to call attention to a fact which may be multiplied a hundredfold or a thousandfold by the experiences of life, a fact which has taken place in modern times. About the middle of the nineteenth century and towards the last third of it, the question of the gold standard, the actual gold standard, became particularly pressing, I might say. And one can make a very interesting observation if one considers everything that was said for and against the gold standard by very clever people in parliaments, trading companies, associations of entrepreneurs, industrial associations of entrepreneurs, and so on, up to the second half of the nineteenth century and towards the last third of it. I do not mean any irony when I say that in those days a huge amount of cleverness was raised for and against the gold standard. And in particular, a conclusion-type played a major role back then, namely that if one really came to this unified gold currency, then the pursuit of free trade and the realization of free trade would prevail everywhere. Free trade will finally triumph.

You can tell, my dear audience, when you read what was said at the time, what was said at the time, it is really clever, it was not said by stupid people, but it was said by extraordinarily clever people. But reality soon said the opposite. Reality has shown that everywhere the gold standard has led to efforts to establish protective tariff systems and to close the individual national borders. That is to say, the cleverest people, those people who, out of their industrial cleverness, said the most sensible things, had to be taught by reality that, in line with reality, the opposite should have been said! As I said, I am not being ironic when I speak of “cleverness”; I mean it quite seriously. For this fact - and it could be multiplied a hundredfold - points us in many directions. What does it point us to? That in the economic field the individual cannot be decisive at all, that he can only be decisive if his judgment coincides with that of others who, in turn, are experienced and skilled in another area of economic life, that is to say, that the individual with his judgment has only one value within the association.

And so we have two areas: the spiritual area of teaching and education, which must be placed in the power of the individual human individuality; and the economic area, which must be placed in the power of the association, the association of the appropriate cooperation of the individual economic sectors, of production, consumption, and the circulation of goods. The proper form of interaction that results from all of this, from the judgment within the associations, must shape economic life. So that we have three links, not parts; by speaking of the tripartite division of the social organism, one has given rise to many misunderstandings; one cannot speak of the three-part human being either, one cannot divide the human being into head, trunk, limbs and metabolism, whereas the human being really consists of these three parts; so one cannot speak of the three of the social organism, but only of the threefold social organism, because these three members should not go their own way, as it were, the head, the circulation system - the rhythmic one - and the metabolism system can go their own way, but precisely because of their relative independence, they also work together in the most economical and rational way. If you take this threefold social order seriously, you can be honest as a democrat, because then you can really implement democracy in the area where it should be implemented, in the area of state and political affairs, where the mature human being faces the mature human being, and where only that which can be judged by a mature human being is decided and administered. It is entirely possible to find the detailed, concrete form of how to work towards this threefold social organism.

However, you see, conditions have become so unnatural in this respect that sometimes, even back in the spring of 1919, when the threefold social organism was taken much more seriously than it is today, sometimes you had to give strange answers. In one country, for example, where a so-called Ministry of Labor had been set up, I was asked by the Minister of Labor: “Yes, but if the social organism is to be threefolded, where do I actually belong?” He meant as Minister of Labor. Well, if you think about the necessities very concretely, the Ministry of Labor is a hybrid between economic life and political life. That is why I said to the minister in question: Yes, unfortunately for you, you have to be cut in half. - Like the brave Swabian who was not afraid and cut the Turk in half, so a half labor minister should have fallen out of our unnatural present circumstances on both the left and the right. But it is precisely these things that prove how things are, and how everything is mixed up, confounded.

And so we have to say: the necessity of the threefold social order arose out of the historical, spiritual-scientific observation of the emergence of democracy. If we observe the quite radical change that occurred in the second decade of the twentieth century, we can also see that that experiences are now possible that could lead people to take such a thing seriously and understand it. One could also say that it was basically only the final consequence of what had already emerged at the end of the eighteenth century in the call for liberty, equality and fraternity. This appeal for liberty, equality and fraternity, which emerged from the French Revolution, is such that it cuts deep into the hearts of all unbiased people, that it must be taken for granted, that it must be striven for. But anyone who is even slightly familiar with the cultural-political literature of the nineteenth century knows how much has been said – and again not by stupid people, but by very clever ones – against these three ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity.

Just read the extraordinary multi-volume work of the very talented Magyar [Eötvös] from the 1850s, and you will see how it is proved in a very subtle philosophical that the idea of equality cannot be realized alongside [the idea of] freedom, and that, in turn, the idea of fraternity cannot be realized alongside the idea of absolute equality, and so on. It must be said: what is being put forward here is clever. One sees at last that these very ideas, in the course of the historical development of mankind, well up from the underground to the surface as something quite justified, but that nevertheless the whole of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century were still under the sway of the suggestion of the unitary state. This suggestion of the unitary state was so great that people worked more and more, especially in Central Europe and also over Western Europe, with the exception of England, to shape the unitary state more and more intensively in terms of its agents. One was under the suggestion of the omnipotence of the unitary state, which had to extend over everything. And into that one could not then fit the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity.

If we recognize that this unified state is striving towards threefold order, then we also very soon realize that spiritual life is striving towards freedom, state and political life towards equality of all mature human beings, and economic life towards true brotherhood in associations, and from there out into all of life.

As soon as one has the idea of threefolding, one also has the agent for realizing freedom, equality and fraternity. Now, of course, there have been many people, my dear audience, who, when they heard something like the threefolding of the social organism, spoke of utopia. But it is not utopian. Just as it emerged from a spiritual-scientific-historical observation, on the other hand, it emerged from a practical observation of life itself, and it is simply not true that this threefold social order would be about imposing over humanity, which has become somewhat chaotic, but rather it is a matter of the fact that for the person who understands this threefold social order, it can be tackled from every single point of life. You can start anywhere, and then the individual beginnings will flow together into a whole by themselves. This is how we started with the threefold social order in the realm of spiritual life.

We started at our Stuttgart Waldorf School, because it is just a school like any other, but a school that has been created out of a truly free spiritual life, I want to mention it first. However, it is difficult to get through today, especially with views on the school system. In this regard, one also experiences strange things. I recently read an article in a magazine that was somewhat critical of the 'National Assembly' that took place in the city of Goethe and Schiller, Weimar, after the so-called German Revolution; of course I have nothing against criticizing this National Assembly, because basically one can say: it is really hardly an exaggeration to describe this national chatter – parliamentarism always has something to do with a chattering association or talkativeness, doesn't it, the special way of talking together! I have nothing against holding up a proper image of this National Assembly. But something strange was said. It was said that this Weimar National Assembly had actually only caused havoc in all areas of public life – with the exception of a single area where it had delivered something useful, namely in the area of schools, through the creation of the so-called primary school, the so-called unified school, and so on.

Now, this essay is based on nothing more than the fact that it is easier to see what nonsense the “Weimar National Assembly” has inaugurated in other areas of life than in the field of education, where everyone can prattle on for a very long time before the nonsense is noticed.

Now, when our “Freie Waldorfschule” was founded in Stuttgart, it was important that the spiritual life itself should be the foundation and soil with its own requirements, from which teaching and education are derived here. Of course, anthroposophical spiritual science is the source of the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf School. I gave the seminar course for the teachers of this Waldorf School based on anthroposophical spiritual science before the opening of the Waldorf School. But this Waldorf School was not misused to instill dogmatic anthroposophy into children in a school of world view. The founding of the Waldorf School was quite the opposite of this. The aim of the Waldorf School was to apply a pedagogy and didactics in which anthroposophical spiritual science can be practically demonstrated right down to the skill of the fingers; from the application of pedagogy and didactics and from what one did, one wanted to show the fruits of anthroposophical feeling and thinking, not by instilling any dogmas. That is why they almost, I would even say radically, refrained from making the Waldorf school a school of world view. That is why religious education was separated from the other subjects. Religious education for Catholic children was entrusted to the Catholic priest, and for Protestant children to the Protestant pastor.

And then, in the course of the school's effectiveness, it became apparent that there was a large number of children, dissident children, who did not attend any lessons, neither Catholic nor Protestant. What should be done with these children?

Initially, the children's group at the Waldorf School was made up of the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory; after all, it was our friend Emil Molt in Stuttgart who founded this Waldorf School, and initially the children were “the children of workers” at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. Now, there were a great many parents who did not want to send their children to any of the religious lessons; but they felt that their children should not grow up without religion, without being introduced to spiritual things. And so we were obliged to set up a kind of anthroposophical free religious education alongside the other lessons, which we then also developed in terms of pedagogy and didactics, and which now stands as a third one, on an equal footing with the other two.

The Protestant religion teachers in particular had to state that they feared that the children would run away from them and run over to the anthroposophical religious education, didn't they? But as I said, it was precisely in this treatment of the religious education questions that it should be shown how far the Waldorf School is from wanting to be a school of world view.

On the other hand, anthroposophical spiritual science is able to answer the question: What are the forces that have taken on physical form in the child after it has descended from the spiritual world, and what are the forces that are particularly active in the child up to the year in which the teeth change, around the age of seven?

They are mainly powers of imitation, and everything that is to be brought to the child at this age must be achieved through a certain study of these childlike powers of imitation.

Other powers then emerge from the background of the child's mind around the seventh year. One has to take these powers into account. One then sees how one has to approach reading, writing and so on; from what one knew from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, a pedagogy and didactics were formed, a real art of education that works towards not introducing reading and writing to children in an abstract way, but in such a way that reading and writing are brought out of a certain artistic, holistic humanity.

Between the ages of six, seven and nine, teaching is such that nothing abstract, nothing that engages the mere head, the mere intellect, is presented to the child. Our mere numbers and letter signs engage the mere intellect if they are not taken from the full activity of the human being. And so it was particularly important for this childhood age to have a great deal of light shed on it through anthroposophical observation of human development. The corresponding pedagogy and didactics were based on this.

Between the ages of nine and ten, there is an important point in a child's development that must be taken into account by educators and teachers. Something occurs that usually goes unnoticed. Before that, the child hardly differs from his or her surroundings. It is best to teach the child in a way that appeals as little as possible to its sense of self. But between the ages of nine and ten, something breaks into the child's mind, the main development of which lasts only a short time. One must be grown to observe what is happening in the child's development, because sometimes it depends on a few days to find the right words, the right encouragement for the child, to bring the right thing forward in the right way.

And so it is important to know what human nature wants every year, every week. And so you bring the child up, and we have developed this pedagogy and didactics to bring the child up to the age of 13, 14, 15, where something completely different occurs in child development.

Eight days ago, I was obliged to ensure in an evening course for teachers that our so-called tenth class could now be opened in the appropriate way. This is the class that children enter when they have reached sexual maturity, or, as we say in anthroposophical spiritual science, at the age when the childlike astrality, the astral body, as we say, the actual spiritual-soul body, is born. This requires a very special deepening into this important age. And in opening this class, the pedagogical-didactic maxim had to be found again to guide young people into this age.

You see, you have to feel the full weight of the age on your soul in a certain way if you really want to practice contemporary pedagogy and didactics in this way. Because you have seen it: in the last few decades – I would say it is an international affair – the so-called youth movement has emerged in the most diverse forms. What did this youth movement mean? The young suddenly demanded something completely new and were aware that the old could not give them what they were demanding. The wanderer instinct and so on, as they are all called, have become known to people.

Now this youth movement has clearly shown that the old were no longer able to be the right authority for the young. The young no longer expected what had previously been expected of the young by the old, and a terrible yearning went through the young. I would like to say: In this yearning, however mistaken and nebulous it was in certain respects, the call for a new pedagogy and didactics is clearly expressed. There is no need to [see] whether something that comes up with such elementary power from the depths of life, whether it is more or less right or wrong, but you only have to look at it in its actuality, then it can already prove this or that to you. In particular, anyone who has seen the latest phase of these youth movements, which have only emerged in recent years, must admit that this youth movement first expressed itself in such a way that the nebulous, chaotic urge of one person to join another emerged. I would like to say – the young lived out their lives in packs, in cliques. Then suddenly a strange turn occurred, only in the last few years and especially among the best members of this youth movement a colossal turn occurred. They got tired of connecting one to the other in small cliques. And those who had previously had a strong urge to join one another in small cliques began to feel a kind of disgust for being together. A certain hermit-like behavior asserted itself, youthful hermit-like behavior. They closed themselves off, they encapsulated themselves, the young people. A complete turnaround has taken place. This is also deeply significant. And again, it is not a Central European, but an international issue that has taken hold of all possible youth groups in the civilized world today. It is a matter of the necessity today to provide for spiritual life from the very depths of all of life.

Something like this should be created by the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which, I would like to say, was also created out of social circumstances. All the blustering about the unified school, which arises from all kinds of enmity and antipathy and sympathy, is of course immediately lost in the objective when one teaches and educates out of the nature of the human being. There, of course, people are taught and educated uniformly. But the matter is brought into being appropriately, not out of political proposals or antipathies and ranklings and räsonnements. The fruitful further development of humanity depends on this, that out of the factual the factual be founded.

But to achieve something like this, to really have teachers who can approach young people in such a way with such a pedagogy and didactics, you need a free spiritual life, because you have to be able to use the full power of the teachers. My dear attendees, many a person has thought for a long time, especially in times of liberal ideas, when freedom has been so greatly undermined, many a person has thought: we need programs, we need comprehensive ideas. Many programs have been devised about the best way to teach, especially about curricula.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, when you put five, six, twelve not particularly clever people together – forgive this somewhat delicate or undelicate allusion – when so and so many people sit down and let their abstract minds , then they come up with the most ideal programs, all of it perfect; Clause I, the teacher has to teach this in class, Clause II, the teacher has to treat the students in such and such a way, Clause III, this or that has to happen. For the eighth year, this is how it has to be done, and so on. In the greatest perfection, paragraph I to x, everything can be presented in this way, and you can get an ideal program out of it, with the average intellectual predisposition of the twelve people who sat down together. Not much is needed to define anything in abstracto. Only because these people have the urge to disagree, we have received not one, but many programs. There are programs and cleverness buzzing through the world. When would there have been more programs and cleverness – whereby the word “cleverness” is not even used ironically – buzzing through the world than precisely in the nineteenth century.

But you see, that is not what matters, what matters is what happens in reality. What matters is real, practical life. Well, we have indeed gradually entered into strange realms of abstraction. Today, people even think about very strange theories in theory. For example, they think about the fact that if they travel from point A to point B at ordinary speed, and a cannon is fired at point A and another cannon is fired at point B, they will hear the cannon that was fired later than the one that was fired earlier. But if they move faster and faster, the interval changes; and then they work out that if they move at the speed of sound, they even hear the one cannon that is fired later at the same time. And if they move faster than the speed of sound, they even hear the cannon that is fired later earlier than the one that is fired earlier!

Now, you see, that may seem quite correct in theory, and there is nothing to be said against it. But someone who thinks in a spiritual sense, thinks realistically, not just logically, has something to object to, because that is only one way to get to the truth, and he wants to think realistically, and then he also has to imagine what such a person would look like who would now move faster than sound. Einstein even calculated what a clock would look like if it were to fly out into space at the speed of light and then come back again. Theoretically, all this can be done, and of course it is all theoretically correct. It has been much admired. But just imagine what the clock would look like when it comes back, or what a person would look like if he were to move at the speed of sound! One thing is certain: one would not be able to judge the differences in the speed of sound, because the human being would have to become sound himself. This would lead one to the conclusion that one cannot help but let concrete reality flow into one's soul, not abstract theory. Only then are we on the right path to truth. But then we also realize that a dozen people can work out very beautiful programs. But a dozen teachers can only realize what lies within the power of these teachers. And the most beautiful ideals have no value at all compared to what really lives in people. Therefore, what is to be achieved must be taken from the reality of the human being. You simply have to create this school republic out of the individual personalities of the teachers, you must not want more than the teachers can achieve, who you can put in their place. You have to take the specific teachers into account, and the school program emerges from this specific teaching staff. But this is only possible in a free spiritual life, in a spiritual life such as is striven for in the threefold social organism, where the individual human being is actually directly confronted with the spiritual world, and feels responsible for what he has to achieve in the field of spiritual life, directly responsible to the spiritual world, not to the school inspector, or through him to the minister of education and so on, but directly to the powers of the spiritual world. For an education and training system such as I have just described can only be developed if one does not merely have an abstract, intellectual spiritual life, but a real spiritual life, when it is the spirit itself that reigns on earth through the deeds of men, when one appeals to the living spirit, not merely to concepts and ideas, not merely to the intellectual and the intellectualizing. But you can only bring it out, bring it forth, this living spiritual life, this active spirit, from the individual human personalities themselves. From the teacher of the lowest elementary school class up to the teacher of the highest school system, each one is integrated into the independent spiritual organism, so that each one can only follow himself, and has so much teaching to do that he still has time to perform administrative tasks, so that everything that is administered is done by those who are still teaching, who really still teach, not by those who have retired or been taken out of the school system. The administration of the school system is the responsibility of those who are still actively teaching. There would be no authority, people say. No, that is precisely where the true authority of spiritual life would be found, namely, the self-evident authority. In no other field can authority arise except that which arises of its own accord. I would like to know how authority can fail to arise when someone really has the will to do something beneficial and knows that someone else can give them advice, then it will come, and then the one who can give the advice will have the self-evident authority.

I have the task of running the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Each teacher is independent in his or her class. The person who does something in class does so on his or her own initiative. The opinion has never been expressed that I have ever ordered anyone to do anything at the Waldorf School. On the other hand, everyone seeks advice on all kinds of matters, and there is a unified spirit in this Waldorf School. The authority is there, as a matter of course. And one could see it grow, this self-evident authority, on the spirit of the Waldorf School in the last two years since this Waldorf School has existed. One could start in this school, which started two years ago with not quite 200 children, which now has over 500 children, who are once again facing difficulties because they do not want to increase the size of the classes, the lower four classes, there should only be as many children admitted as were there before the Elementary School Law was passed. Recently, however, it has become clear that parents will not put up with this. Now, [in] this Waldorf School, there is a place where you can actually realize in a certain area what you can know from the free spiritual life. Sometimes one has strange experiences there, which I perhaps, for easily understandable reasons, in so far as they arise from the interaction, in the social interaction that we do not, however, let into the teaching, with the official life, about which I I prefer not to make any comments on now; but it is already possible to see how the individual things that lie in this threefolding of the social organism can be tackled from the practical, concrete point of view, and how one does not have to deal with some utopia.

Likewise, this can be done in other areas of spiritual life. And in fact, the anthroposophical worldview will not impose itself dogmatically, but will prove its right to exist through its viability. Because, my dear audience, one should not believe at all that someone who writes something like 'The Key Points of the Social Question' from such a basis, from a realistic basis, is thinking of anything utopian. There is no question of that, not even in the choice of expressions: threefold social order. In recent years, when many people have made the threefold order into a sect, which of course it was certainly not meant to be by me, I have had to experience it again and again, especially in Germany: how is it to be organized? How this, how that? It is really quite bad when, even in the post-war period, you are always confronted with the word “organize,” and especially when you call something you would like to see realized an organism, and you still hear the words: “organize, organize”; you organize where there is something mechanical; an organism is precisely there so that you cannot organize it. You cannot organize the organic. That must appear as an organism. Where you want to organize something, you only have the [inorganic] at hand. You cannot organize an organism. You have to let it become.

You can see the thoroughly misunderstood nature of things when such things occur. And so the threefold structure of the social organism is based on the fact that things must form, that one only has to develop the formative forces, that the threefold social organism must arise. Therefore, it cannot be described in the abstract. Especially those who have spoken of utopia would actually always like to have utopias. When speaking of such things, one can hear it asked, well: what then will be the position regarding ownership of a sewing machine in the threefolded social organism? This question has been asked here at this place, and so on.

Now, my dear attendees, a free spiritual life is only possible under the condition of a real spiritual life. Once, when I was talking about such things in a Swiss city, a university teacher replied to me: Yes, but we already have the freedom of the spiritual life, because in all state constitutions it says: Science and its teaching are free. But, ladies and gentlemen, the point is that science, which is free, should only be there as a free science. If, from the outset, science is raised in such a way that people are trained who are suitable for this or that office, and who are taught the program of their office, then you can safely decree that science and its teaching are free. If science itself is enslaved, then enslaved science naturally feels very free when it is allowed to develop as a slave.

And so it was often replied: In such and such a country, the state does not interfere in schools at all. That is the worst thing to say, because then you no longer notice it, and that is much worse than when you notice it and rebel against it, than when you no longer even notice how what flows in is only based on state principles arising without factual or specialized knowledge from the incorrect democratic, when one no longer even notices what should arise from the abilities for each new generation, what the human being still brings with him from the spiritual world by entering into physical existence through birth. We simply need teachers and educators who stand with holy reverence before the child and say to themselves: something from the spiritual world has been entrusted to me in this child, which I have to fathom and solve as a mystery. I must inquire what message from the spiritual world they have given him. Knowledge of the spiritual world must be alive in teaching and education; this spiritual world must be real in teaching and education. When the coming generation is tyrannized by that which is already there, by the living generation, then the spiritual life is made unfree. And to a large extent, the question of teaching and education in a free spiritual life is a question of teachers, the question of finding the right teachers, those who stand before the growing children as I have just characterized it.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I wanted to use a few strokes, which of course must always remain fragmentary, to point out how the free spiritual life is to be thought of in the threefold social organism. As I said at the beginning of my talk, today we are actually facing a different time from that in the spring, in the spring of 1919. At that time one could believe that there would really be a sufficiently large number of people who would support the realization of the threefold social order. Today one would be out of touch with the times if one had the same faith as one had then. Threefolding must not become a sect either, something that one can believe in and advocate everywhere and at all times, theoretically as one's opinion. Today it is quite clear, however heavy-heartedly one has to admit it, that within European civilization the people who actually do the economic work have no sense of progress, no insight into real needs, that one is preaching to deaf ears if one wants to work into economic life with reasonable foundations. Today it is clear that one can present individual productive examples to the world, as we tried to do in “The Coming Day” and “Futurum”. These examples will exist as individual white ravens, they will be careful to survive, and they will fulfill the expectations placed on them, at least as individuals. But today we cannot speak of the fact that one comes across an insight in general economic life in order to be able to grasp such things with such ideas, as one could still believe in the first urge of human experiences and results in 1919. In the meantime, people have become accustomed to glossing over the old declining forces. They are still downward forces, after all, and the collapse is still coming. They have only decided to delay the collapse a little, to let everything slide, so that they do not have to expend the energy to move forward to new ideas. And humanity is largely asleep and does not notice how the downward forces are actually raging, and how, with each quarter, civilized humanity is drawing closer to this decline. People would much rather face the convulsions and terrible upheavals that lie in wait for the future in the present if they cannot warm to ideas in the immediate present that could be properly extracted from reality in a calm development, which will nevertheless be needed in the future.

And so we can say that there is little hope to be placed in economic life today. People will have to be forced to take up the new ideas, through their own need, through the effect of the forces of decline. But in the spiritual life we must work unstintingly to develop the free spiritual life as a member of the threefold organism. This is what must not flag, what must be cultivated unconditionally, because the time in which we live is such that people's souls are becoming emptier and emptier, more and more desolate. They are too lazy to admit this to themselves today, but we are heading for terrible times in terms of people's mental state, which will also be reflected in their physical condition.

I have spoken of this often, including in public lectures. The spiritual life must save us through to the times when reasonable people will also see something on the economic front. It is necessary that this spiritual life be cultivated in its freedom wherever it can be cultivated. Anthroposophical soil is the best soil imaginable for this, because then work must be done out of complete freedom. For what needs to be worked out is not yet there. And since it is spirit, it can only be worked out through freedom. And so, especially in the near future, anthroposophical striving and true social striving will increasingly coincide. And we will have to face the souls with the fact that the economic will have to lag behind, that the spiritual simply has to go ahead today.

This is also shown by the qualities of our opponents; in Central Europe, a strange, well-organized opposition is now asserting itself. This well-organized opposition had already worked its way up to the point that at the time, on printed slips of paper distributed to all the people in this packed, largest Stuttgart hall, it was written, not only in allusions, but quite clearly, that it was actually my fault that the Battle of Marnesch was lost in 1914, and that Minister Simons in England has done poorly in recent times. It was not just in innuendo, but it was written on the slips of paper in a very crude way! You could see how it is here with widely extended parties that do not want to admit what has actually happened, that need scapegoats because it no longer works to say that the stab in the back, with which one first wanted to cover up a really eminently lost war, a war that was lost by every trick in the book, they wanted to cover that up with the 'stab in the back'; now they wanted to cover up the absolute incompetence of anyone who has ever led an army, of Ludendorffism, that's what they want to cover up. Today they want to make great geniuses out of people who are quite incapable. A cultural life steeped in lies is a cultural life in decline.

And the situation is no different in the West, no different in America. There, everything is a little more pronounced, where defeat makes things stand out more sharply. Everywhere we need to extract a real, a true, a free spiritual life from the corruption of humanity, which is suffocating in lies and untruthfulness today. For this is identical with truth, and this is at the same time identical with a striving that is in keeping with reality. Therefore, even if there is little prospect of success today, we may still believe that a sufficiently large number of people can warm to a full understanding of the idea of threefolding. Those who can muster the necessary enthusiasm and courage for a free spiritual life will help the threefold social organism to get back on its feet. Then a truly free spiritual life will become a reality. If it becomes a reality in people's hearts, in their powers and in their actions, then the threefold social organism will most certainly follow of its own accord out of the necessity, out of the need of the time. (Lively applause!)

Discussion

Question: How can an ordinary person, who has no influence on public institutions, work in the spirit of threefolding? Rudolf Steiner: The question that was asked here first is: How can an ordinary person, who has no influence on public institutions, work in the spirit of threefolding? Well, firstly, it is not quite clear to me how someone can be without influence on public institutions. Unless he is in prison or in some other place where he can hardly move, he is actually always subject to a certain influence on public institutions. The outside world ensures that one is never completely without influence on public institutions; one has to pay taxes and so on, so one always has some influence on public institutions. So the question cannot really be put that way.

But then, if perhaps what is meant is: How can one work in the sense of the threefold social order, when one perhaps does not have the opportunity to speak, to speak freely somehow, when one does not have the opportunity to be, let's say, a member of parliament or something similar, how can one work in the sense of the threefold social order of the social organism? Then you have to say: Well, this impulse for threefolding is something very concrete. And that is why you can actually only talk about it in concrete examples. You see, I want to say the following, for example. There are institutions everywhere in the sense of nationalization, partial or more or less extensive nationalization - let's say, of medical matters, of nursing. Now, it has happened time and again that good people – who, in their own opinion, are “good” followers of our philosophy – come and say that they would like to have this or that remedy, and so on! So they would actually like to encourage quackery and to violate the law! They can be won over for that, those people! They don't need to have any influence on public institutions, but when they lack something, they don't recognize - perhaps with more or less justification - the state-recognized doctor and want to cure somehow from behind. I have even known ministers who appeared in public parliament to speak out against quackery and for the protection of the medical profession by law, and afterwards, when they themselves became ill, or anyone else became ill, they turned to someone who was not a state-recognized doctor! It is terribly difficult to persuade people to really join those movements that simply correspond to the introduction of such institutions, which are necessary if one wants to have a free spiritual life, or in general, if one wants that which one professes! Many such examples could be cited, where everyone, in their place, by not being afraid to speak out wherever it is possible for them, takes a stand against what they recognize as evil. If you recognize the state protection of medicine as an absurdity, then speak up for it! Or, ladies and gentlemen, is it not an absurdity that over there, across the border, at Leopoldshöhe, there must be a different art of healing than here just a few steps away? But a doctor who is licensed over there is not allowed to help here. If you give in to reason, you will immediately see the matter as an absurdity. But if, let us say, for example, you are a member of the Federal Council or something similar, then you do not see this absurdity! And if you do see it, then you do not find it opportune to represent it. But if one person finds another, there will eventually be enough people to really come to reason. And instead of asking: How can an ordinary person, who has no part in public affairs, become active in the spirit of threefolding, do what one finds in every step and turn of life, in order to carry it out in the spirit of threefolding. Then one will see that every hour, every day, one finds opportunities to become active in the spirit of threefolding.

Question: In Holland, the constitutional ban on official Catholic processions is now to be lifted, which is causing quite a stir. Would this actually be a question of the free spiritual life or also of the public legal life? Rudolf Steiner: With some questions it is so with the threefold social organism, although the idea is quite right, of course: How does the blood of the chest or the head come to play this or that role in the migraine? The blood simply circulates, and so one cannot say that the blood of the chest organism is different from the blood of the head, but one can only speak of the blood in general. And so it is not easy to categorize things again. The threefold social organism is precisely manifested in the fact that things cannot be categorized. However, one does experience very strange things. In recent years I have always had to speak of the three-part human organism, the sensory organism, the rhythmic organism and the metabolic-limb organism, and in recent years a great deal has been done by myself and our medical and scientific friends to develop this idea of the three-part human being. But recently a book was written by someone called Kurt Leese, I believe. He has now, because I said that things should not be put together in boxes, but that the whole human being is head, nevertheless the human being is mainly head in the head, the whole human being is head. Things go into each other. The head is also taken care of and dependent on the limbs. Things all go into each other. Kurt Leese can no longer think this. He can only think of three if it is nicely next to each other, but he cannot think it when it goes into each other. He says: It's a shocking idea.

But we will have to get used to such shocks, even in the tripartite social organism, if we are to imagine, through the effect of abstractions, what a clock looks like when it flies away at the speed of sunlight and returns after years, is difficult to verify for a variety of reasons: firstly, because of the nature of the clock; secondly, because of the person who would then have to check it when the clock returns, and so on. So the present is not shocked at all by such ideas of the abstract. But it is shocked when something that is in line with reality is placed before it. So it is necessary not to press things so much that one now asks: Is this a matter of the free spiritual life or of the legal life? One can say: If one begins to prohibit any expressions or revelations of the spiritual life at all, to make legal provisions about it, then one is on a slippery slope with regard to the spiritual life. I must say, you see, with regard to those institutions, that I once showed you here – those who were there – a peculiar document, the document that was once issued as a patent in 1847, I believe, in Switzerland, where it says: It was through the power of the Almighty that the brave Swiss general Dufour succeeded in expelling the Jesuits from the country. Then it is explained in more detail. Today, in free Switzerland, it seems a little strange that the eradication of the Jesuits is attributed to the grace of God and the power that God has given! But it is preserved that way; I had the document photographed because it is so beautiful. I will show the photograph again on occasion. It is, after all, quite good to occasionally bring things home to people face to face. But even with regard to Jesuitism, I am not in favor of combating it by law. Those who want to fight it should fight it with intellectual weapons. One should not spare oneself the inconvenience of having to fight against everything intellectual with intellectual weapons, not by making laws. Laws can be made with majority decisions. One does not need to say that the majority is always nonsense, because then reality, social reality, would always be nonsense. Now, as I said, one does not need to go that far, but in any case one cannot say that the majority is always wisdom. And laws can be made in a democratic state, especially with majority decisions. But certain things just cannot be done by majority vote. They have to live out. And so everything that is regarded as the erring spiritual must also live out. Therefore, one must say: It is a matter of freedom and not of compulsion when efforts are made to reintroduce the banned Catholic processions and to lift the bans against Catholic processions. The only remedy is to show that these processions are not reasonable, and to educate people to this effect, so that they do not take part in them; then they will stop of their own accord! This is the only remedy in spiritual life, just as one can teach a person good taste and he will do the right thing of his own accord, but not by passing laws against it.

That is what a free spiritual life must demand. The one who has to resort to laws in the spiritual realm is on the path that I once described in Nuremberg in 1908 in a lecture cycle, where I said - it is not said without significance, using strong inks, but these strong inks should characterize adequately – I said at the time: Actually, today's humanity no longer strives to go out on the street without a doctor on the right and a police officer on the left, the doctor for physical protection, the police officer, well, for protection in materialistic times, yes, for physicality too! That has gradually become the ideal. I have heard many things in my life, but time and again I had to shrink back a little inside when I heard, with increasing frequency, over and over again: “That should be prohibited by law.” That had gradually become an awfully common saying – instead of taking the trouble to teach people good taste themselves, so that these things would stop of themselves – 'it should be banned by law', 'by majority decision' or something like that should be done. That is the one thing that must be asserted in principle. Therefore, all prohibitions against processions and the like should be lifted, and things should be allowed to run their course. Then spiritual life will also be able to express itself freely

It is absolutely essential that stupidity, folly and evil be conquered by cleverness and kindness, that ugliness be conquered by beauty, and that nothing be legally eradicated in the realm of spiritual life.

Question of the youth movement: The speaker explains that the individual members of the youth movements want and need to experience truth and reality; the economic sphere seems to them to be the area where everyone has a say, where everyone should be active and engaged. Later, the individual often withdraws again to reflect or simply to get away from society. It is almost impossible to reach a solution. Soon it is the economic that provides a value system; there is no recognition of the state or the political, but everything is conditioned by the economic. Individuals are diverted from their spiritual nature by economic life - or they withdraw into solitude].

Rudolf Steiner: In essence, the Lord has characterized what I have already said in the lecture: the phenomena of the youth movements of recent decades. But it would not be entirely correct to stop at this phenomenon of the youth movement. I have already found some understanding among members of this youth movement when I have struck what lives in the deeper foundations of the whole development of time. I had to say to some members of the youth movement, to which you yourself seem to belong and know very well: Yes, the year 1899, for example, is an extraordinarily important one for the development of humanity as a whole, and in particular for the development of Western civilization. And anyone who has an eye for such things knows how fundamentally different those people are who either lived through their childhood before 1899 was around, so they were a few years or ten years old, or those people who, let's say, were even born later, so they are hardly in their twenties now, and those people who were born before 90 and so on. At the bottom of their souls, very important things were going on, I would say, from the very source of existence, and that is connected with the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century, gates to the supersensible world were opened for the first time in the Western world. It was no longer possible, let us say, in the 1880s, to lead a different life, even with a powerful urge for the spiritual life; the Nietzschean life is more or less that life, which one must present as one that has become ill from the decline of Western culture because it could not find what it was looking for: the spiritual basis in everything phenomenal, in everything external, in everything sensual. The life of Nietzsche is therefore extraordinarily interesting to study from this point of view. He participates in Schopenhauerism, becomes ill from Schopenhauerism; he participates in historicism, becomes ill from historicism; he participates in Wagnerism, becomes ill from Wagnerism. He participates in naturalism, in positivism, becomes ill from it. He participates in the Darwinian molding of the idea of humanity, becomes ill from it, and so on, and so on. Instead of the idea of repeated earthly lives, he comes to the idea of the return of the same, becomes ill from it. Nietzsche could not help but fall ill from his urge for the supernatural world. It was simply not possible to achieve this directly and fundamentally at the end of the nineteenth century or before the end of the nineteenth century. The gates have opened, and today we cannot help but turn to the revelations of the spiritual world if we want to achieve an inwardly satisfied existence. Speaking of nature in the way that was justified in the 1880s is no longer justified today. Today we can point out how there was a current of opinion favoring an 'ignorabimus', how a naturalist, Du Bois-Reymond, spoke of 'ignorabimus', how Ranke, the historian, by seeking to present history as an event with the exception of the Christ event; that this comes from the primal forces, that history does not belong there - so 'ignorabimus'. Today we cannot do that. Today we are on the threshold of the supersensible world wanting to enter, and it is only the dull reluctance that is still bracing itself against the acceptance of a spiritual world view. And what is rumbling in the youth, that is the deeper thing, that is rumbling inside. And therefore, no matter how much individual members of the youth movement may say, “We do not want the abstract, we want the emotional,” they will still have to realize: What spiritual science in anthroposophy wants to be is precisely not something abstract, it is the full human being, it is what comes out of the whole human being, it is what expresses itself as art and as religion and as science, and it is the point at which the whole, full human being can come to his inner realization. And today we are only suffering from the fact that economic routine does not want to take leave of economic reason and that we must first begin to work on the recovery of spiritual life, until the unreasonableness of economic life must follow through necessity. And I am convinced that something good and right will come out of the youth movement, just as I do not despair when people keep saying, for my sake, that they cannot distinguish between expressionism and a windmill, a towel just pulled out of the water and hung up to dry, or a human portrait, say, for example, a boot heel. Of course, sometimes you can't distinguish that with the expressionists, but nevertheless, there are approaches to something in it, which, if it is refined in the most diverse places where it appears, will lead to that in which spiritual science, as it is represented here, only wants to be a guide and a leader and to work from the very most elementary.

But of course, sometimes you experience the fact that, despite the fact that you mean it to be so concrete, the opposite is held against you. I just want to say that last as a joke. The day before yesterday I had a lecture in Zurich. I spoke with slides about this building here. Then afterwards, one of the audience stood up and said: Yes, why do we need such a building, why do we need a Christ's head and Christ at all, why do we need it today? I was walking on the street this afternoon, there was a very drunk person, I followed him, and I joined him. This is a temple of God, this is a real temple and we do not need built temples. — On this occasion, I only regretted that no friendly spirit was found to find the right door with the person in question. But in view of the unnatural conditions of the present time, one may meet people who do not mean, as I say, that we should not build temples, but who mean that we should follow drunkards. They really want to work from the elementary, and they deserve, so to speak, to have spiritual science brought to their full understanding, because they can understand it. For the youth movement is connected with a very great change that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and that is actually based not only on superficial historical forces but on profound cosmic forces.