The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XXXI

[ 1 ] Another anthology, which presented the cultural achievements of the nineteenth century, was published by Hans Kraemer. It consisted of longer treatises on the individual branches of cognitive life, technical creation and social development.

[ 2 ] I was invited to give an account of literary life. And so the development of fantasy life in the nineteenth century ran through my soul. I did not describe it like a philologist who works such things "from the sources"; I described what I had experienced inwardly in the development of fantasy life.

[ 3 ] This presentation was also significant for me because I had to talk about phenomena of spiritual life without being able to go into the experience of the spirit world. The actual spiritual impulses from this world that are expressed in the poetic phenomena remained unmentioned.

[ 4 ] In this case, too, I was confronted with what the life of the soul has to say about a phenomenon of existence when it places itself on the standpoint of ordinary consciousness without bringing the content of this consciousness into activity in such a way that it rises experiencing into the spirit world.

[ 5 ] I experienced this "standing at the gate" of the spirit world even more meaningfully in a treatise I had to write for another work. It was not a work of the century, but a collection of essays intended to characterize the various areas of knowledge and life, insofar as human "egoism" is a driving force in the development of these areas. Arthur Dix published this work. It was called "Egoism" and was very much in keeping with the times - the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

[ 6 ] The impulses of intellectualism, which had asserted themselves in all areas of life since the fifteenth century, are rooted in the "individual life of the soul", if they really are genuine expressions of its essence. When man reveals himself intellectually out of social life, it is not a genuine intellectual expression, but the imitation of such an expression.

[ 7 ] One of the reasons why the call for social feeling has emerged so intensely in this age is that this feeling is not originally experienced inwardly in intellectuality. Even in these things, humanity desires most what it does not have.

[ 8 ] I was given the task of presenting "Egoism in Philosophy" for this book. Now my essay only bears this heading because the overall title of the book demanded it. This heading should actually be: "Individualism in Philosophy". I tried to give a very brief overview of Western philosophy since Thales and to show how its development aims to bring human individuality to experience the world in images of ideas, just as my "Philosophy of Freedom" attempts to do for knowledge and the moral life.

[ 9 ] With this essay I again stand before the "Gates of the Spiritual World". The images of ideas that reveal the content of the world are shown in human individuality. They appear so that they await the experience through which the soul can step into the spirit world. I paused in the description at this point. There is an inner world that shows how far mere thinking can go in understanding the world.

[ 10 ] You can see that I have described the pre-anthroposophical life of the soul from the most diverse points of view before my dedication to the public anthroposophical presentation of the spirit world. There can be no contradiction between this and my advocacy of anthroposophy. For the world view that emerges is not refuted by anthroposophy, but rather expanded and continued.

[ 11 ] If you begin to present the spirit world as a mystic, everyone is fully entitled to say: you are talking about your personal experiences. What you describe is subjective. To follow such a spiritual path did not arise from the spiritual world as my task.

[ 12 ] This task consisted of creating a foundation for anthroposophy that was as objective as scientific thinking when it does not stop at the recording of sensory facts, but advances to a summarizing understanding. What I presented in scientific-philosophical terms and what I presented in scientific terms, following on from Goethe's ideas, was open to debate. It could be considered more or less correct or incorrect; but it aspired to the character of the objective-scientific in the fullest sense.

[ 13 ] And from this cognition, free of the emotional and mystical, I then drew the experience of the spirit world. You can see how in my "Mysticism", in "Christianity as a Mystical Fact", the concept of mysticism is guided in the direction of this objective cognition. And you can see in particular how my "Theosophy" is structured. In every step that is taken in this book, spiritual vision is in the background. Nothing is said that does not originate from this spiritual vision. But as the steps are taken, at the beginning of the book it is natural-scientific ideas in which the vision envelops itself, until, in the ascent into the higher worlds, it has to become more and more active in the free formation of the spiritual world. But this formation grows out of the natural science like the blossom of a plant out of the stem and the leaves. - Just as the plant is not seen in its completeness if one only looks at it up to the blossom, so nature is not experienced in its completeness if one does not ascend from the sensual to the spiritual.

[ 14 ] So I strove to present the objective continuation of science in anthroposophy, not to place something subjective alongside this science. - It goes without saying that this endeavor was not understood at first. Science was held to be closed to that which precedes anthroposophy, and there was no inclination at all to animate the ideas of science in such a way as to lead to a grasp of the spiritual. They were under the spell of the habits of thought formed in the second half of the nineteenth century. They did not have the courage to break through the shackles of mere sensory observation; they feared entering areas where everyone would use their imagination.

[ 15 ] This was my inner orientation when Marie von Sivers and I approached the leadership of the German section of the Theosophical Society in 1902. Marie von Sivers was the personality who, through her whole being, made it possible to keep any sectarian character away from what came about through us and to give the cause a character that placed it in the general intellectual and educational life. She was deeply interested in dramatic and declamatory-recitative art and had undergone training in this direction, especially at the best teaching establishments in Paris, which had given her skills a beautiful perfection. She was still continuing her training at the time when I met her in Berlin to learn about the various methods of artistic speaking.

[ 16 ] Marie von Sivers and I soon became deep friends. And on the basis of this friendship, a collaboration developed in the widest possible range of spiritual fields. Cultivating anthroposophy together, as well as poetry and recitation, soon became our purpose in life. In this jointly cultivated spiritual life alone could lie the center from which anthroposophy was initially carried into the world in the rhymes of the Theosophical Society.

[ 17 ] Marie von Sivers had heard much about H. P. Blavatsky and the institutions and development of the Theosophical Society from Countess Wachtmeister, H. P. Blavatsky's intimate friend, during our first joint visit to London. She was highly familiar with what had once been revealed to the Society as spiritual content and how this content had been further cultivated.

[ 18 ] When I have spoken of the fact that it was possible to find within the framework of the Theosophical Society those people who wished to listen to communications from the spirit world, I do not mean that such personalities were primarily those who were then enrolled as members of the Theosophical Society. Many of these, however, soon proved to be understanding towards my way of spirit-knowledge.

[ 19 ] But a large proportion of the members were fanatical followers of individual heads of the Theosophical Society. They swore by the dogmas issued by these strongly sectarian leaders.

[ 20 ] I was repelled by the triviality and dilettantism of the work of the Theosophical Society. Only within the English Theosophists did I find an inner content that still came from Blavatsky and which was properly cultivated by Annie Besant and others at the time. I could never have worked myself in the style in which these Theosophists worked. But I regarded what lived among them as a spiritual center to which one could worthily connect if one took the spread of spiritual knowledge in the deepest sense seriously.

[ 21 ] So it was not the members united in the Theosophical Society that Marie von Sivers and I counted on, but those people in general who joined in with heart and mind when spiritual knowledge was taken seriously.

[ 22 ] The work within the then existing branches of the Theosophical Society, which was necessary as a starting point, was therefore only one part of our activity. The main thing was the organization of public lectures, in which I spoke to an audience that was outside the Theosophical Society and that came to my lectures only because of their content.

[ 23 ] From those personalities who became acquainted in this way with what I had to say about the spirit world, and from those who found their way to this kind of activity from their involvement with some "theosophical direction", what later became the Anthroposophical Society was formed within the framework of the Theosophical Society.

[ 24 ] Among the various accusations that have been leveled against me because of my work in the Theosophical Society - also on the part of this Society itself - is the accusation that I used this Society, which was respected in the world, as a springboard to pave the way for my own spiritual knowledge.

[ 25 ] There can be no question of that. When I accepted the invitation to join the Society, it was the only serious institution in which there was any real intellectual life. And if the Society's attitude and work had remained as they were then, I and my friends would never have had to leave. Only within the Theosophical Society could the special section "Anthroposophical Society" have been officially formed.

[ 26 ] But as early as 1906, phenomena began to make themselves felt in the Theosophical Society which showed its decline to an alarming degree.

[ 27 ] If even earlier, at the time of H.P. Blavatsky, such phenomena were claimed by the outside world, then at the beginning of the century there was the fact that in the seriousness of the spiritual work on the part of the Society, whatever inaccuracies had occurred had been made good. These incidents were also controversial.

[ 28 ] But since 1906, activities reminiscent of the excesses of spiritualism occurred in the Society, over whose leadership I had not the slightest influence, and which made it necessary for me to emphasize more and more that the part of this Society that was under my leadership had absolutely nothing to do with these things. These activities reached their peak when a Hindu boy claimed that he was the personality in whom Christ would appear in a new life on earth. A special society was formed in the Theosophical movement to spread this absurdity, the "Star of the East". It was quite impossible for me and my friends to accept the members of this "Star of the East" as members of the German Section, as they wanted and as Annie Besant, in particular, as President of the Theosophical Society, intended. And because we could not do this, we were excluded from the Theosophical Society in 1913. We were forced to found the Anthroposophical Society as an independent one.

[ 29 ] I have thus rushed far ahead of the description of the events in my life; this alone was necessary, because only these later facts can shed the right light on the intentions I had when I joined the Society at the beginning of the century.

[ 30 ] I said, when I spoke for the first time in London in 1902 at the Congress of the Theosophical Society, that the union which the individual Sections form should consist in each one bringing to the center what it holds within itself; and I emphasized sharply that I intended this above all for the German Section. I made it clear that this section would never act as a bearer of fixed dogmas, but as a place of independent spiritual research, which would like to come to an understanding about the cultivation of genuine spiritual life at the joint meetings of the whole society.